Ruta Skadi
By middle school, Naomi Misteria has eschewed friendships and takes refuge in the library. School librarians and public librarians become her mothers. Bastions of information and safety. Get on a librarian’s good side and the world is yours.
“How old do I have to be to get a job?” she asks one.
You can ask a librarian anything and they always take it seriously.
“Where do you want to work, dear?”
“Here. Or a farm. But here is easier to walk to.”
“Why a farm? Do you like animals?”
“I want to grow things.”
“I see.”
Naomi shyly pushes up her sleeve and shows the quote she’s written on her arm with a permanent marker: “Might I have a bit of earth?” from The Secret Garden.
The librarian smiles. “I can let you water the plants?”
Naomi reads and reads and reads and reads. She’s devouring John Irving novels at far too young an age but she finds her heroines in nearly all of them. She’s the sexual suspect of Jennie Fields. The angry loner of Melony. The bear in Susie—oh how she longs for that bear suit.
She reads The Thorn Birds and sinks her teeth into the indomitable Justine O’Neill, who has no use for childhood, doesn’t smile or play or joke or let anything bother her. Her one weakness is her beautiful younger brother, Dane.
One day, Naomi will meet a Great Dane, and allow him to be her one weakness.
When she devours Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, she falls in love with Serafina Pekkala, but falls into obeisance when the character Ruta Skadi comes on the scene. The Latvian witch is beyond beautiful, vivid and passionate. Proud and pitiless.
Proud and pitiless, Naomi writes on her arm.
Her class does a family tree unit. The teacher says Naomi can trace her adoptive parents’ lineage.
“I’m not adopted,” Naomi says, proud and pitiless.
Mrs. Weintraub does an unexpected thing: She apologizes. “I’m so sorry, dear. It was thoughtless of me. What would you like to do for the unit instead?”
But already the girl has learned an interesting lesson—being offered agency can move her deeply. “I’ll think of something,” she says, and slips away before the tears come.
Over the next two weeks, Naomi Misteria invents a family out of whole cloth.
She leaves the maternal branch barren—her mother threw Naomi away so her life wasn’t even worthy of imagination.
Instead, Naomi creates a paternal grandmother named Ruta Skadi and from her, a Latvian heritage.
She puts in the work, researching history and places.
Crafting occupations and migratory routes.
Hunting down a Latvian-English dictionary to create names out of the nouns important to her: mystery, garden, flowers, earth.
She translates proud and pitiless to Lepni un Ne?ēlīgi and makes it the family motto.
She designs a heraldic banner from when Latvia was a crusader state called Terra Mariana, and fills it with flowers, books and witches.
Her bound family history project comes back with a circled A and a note to see the teacher after class. Naomi stands before Mrs. Weintraub’s desk, proud and pitiless.
“His Dark Materials?” the teacher asks.
Naomi nods and rolls one of her shoulders. “Ever love a book so much you want to live in it?”
Mrs. Weintraub smiles. “It’s a beautiful series. I’m offended daemons aren’t a real thing.”
She reaches in her desk drawer and takes out a little sprig of pine needles. Naomi knows at once it’s meant to be cloud pine, which is ridden by witches in Pullman’s world. She takes it and presses it between the pages of The Subtle Knife.
Years later, Naomi will meet a man who mishears her first name, and calls her Nomi.
She keeps it. Adopts it. Builds her family tree on it.
The man, Ethan Hasen, will become her husband.
He loves anagrams, and instead of a wedding ring, he takes Ruta Skadi and rearranges it into Dusk Tiara.
He designs the headpiece and commissions a jeweler to execute it.
Standing before a justice of the peace, Nomi wears this gorgeous coronet of leaves in her short, thick black hair.
Hair that will soon fall out from chemo, then grow back silver.
When saying their vows, Nomi and Ethan join hands and rest them on the open palms of a third man, a Great Dane who is Nomi’s weakness.
Liko and Dane took their coffee and breakfast into the den. Liko connected his laptop to the big TV and opened his saved game.
He tried feeding another wisteria seed to the Green Man but the foliate face kept its mouth shut. He tried with the duck, who wasn’t interested, then with the dog, who went on snoring.
“I’ll show you something funny,” Dane said. “Nothing to do with the mystery, just an Easter egg. See the vase of flowers by the dog? Those are lotus blossoms. Click one. Any one.”
Liko did, and like the wisteria bloom, the blossom aged with every click, until the petals fell away, leaving the many-holed seed pod. The dog raised its head. Sniffed.
Then it threw up.
“Yikes,” Liko said, as a loud, ripping hurl came from somewhere else in the chamber. Dane started laughing. Liko clicked back toward the altar. The Green Man had gone utterly, stonily white, his eyes bulging, a hand over his mouth, stifling gags.
“What is going on?” Liko said.
“Trypophobia,” Dane said. “Fear of holes. Both Nomi and Mary Schoenfeld had it bad, and dried lotus seed heads could make both of them sick.” He gave a few last chuckles, shaking his head. “It’s just one big inside joke. Anyway, the wisteria seed. No one wants to eat it. You have to grind it up.”
“With?”
“A mortar and pestle. You borrow it from a rabbit.”
“The ones in the ceiling?”
Dane shrugged. Liko clicked on the ceiling motif but nothing happened. He hunted all over the chamber, looking for another rabbit while Dane just watched. Frustrated, Liko picked up his empty plate and held it out. “Please?”
Dane crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. He looked at the plate. At Liko. Back at the plate.
“Kiss me first.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
They stared a beat. The air roaring in his ears, Liko leaned toward Dane, a hand lifting to take his face because screw the game, he was going to kiss this guy into next week.
Dane drew back. “Dude, put the plate down.”
“Sorry.” Liko set it down. At least he thought he set it down. It hit the floor and smashed rather spectacularly.
“Smooth,” Dane said.
Liko sunk his face into his hands. “I hate everything.”
Dane thumped his back. “It’s okay. Pick up the bigger pieces. I’ll get a garbage bag.” He scrambled over the back of the couch and went toward the kitchen.
“Fuck,” Liko hissed, pushing back the coffee table and gathering the larger shards into his palm.
He was sweating and his heart hiccupped like a drunk as he replayed the moment, cursing his asinine impulse control.
Who the fuck cared about a broken plate?
He should’ve grabbed the back of Dane’s shirt and hauled him back down onto the couch.
Kiss first. Clean up later. The hell was wrong with him?
“Quit brooding,” Dane said, wheeling the vacuum cleaner in. “The moment came once, it’ll come again.”
“No, it’s gone forever,” Liko said moodily. “I killed it.”
After damage control, Dane took over the cursor and backtracked out of the chamber and down the stairs. “You don’t notice it on the way up, you have to be going the other way.” He circled a painting hanging on the bulkhead over the treads.
“This is the Jade Rabbit,” Dane said. “From Chinese tradition. He grinds herbs to make the elixir of life for Chang’e, the moon goddess. Click the mortar and pestle and take them back to the chamber.”
Liko did, and dropped another wisteria seed from his cache into the mortar. As he ground it up, a little flare rose from the bowl, then the fine powder swirled toward the window and encircled the full moon.
Then nothing.
“Now what?” Liko said, thinking, How about kissing again?
“Remember the story from the Jakata Tales?” Dane said. “When Buddha as a hare threw himself into the fire to feed a beggar? As a reward, he was set on the face of the moon. Western civilization calls it the man in the moon. But in Asian culture, it’s a rabbit. Anyway, click the moon.”
The iconic surface shadows coalesced into a rabbit, which bounded out of the moon, through the window and into the chamber. Sleek and snowy white, it leaped into the Green Man’s lap and put something in his hand. The foliate god then held the hand out to the player.
Liko clicked over and saw it was a pearl.
“What do I do with this?”
“A pearl is a…” Dane turned a hand over in the air.
“Stone?” Liko said. “A gem. A jewel.”
“Stones, gems and jewels go in a…?”
“Necklace? A ring? A…”
Dane mimed putting something on his head.
“A crown. A tiara.” He turned toward the laptop. “Duh.”
The tiara had two circular spaces on its front. The pearl slipped into one. Unprompted, Liko went for the third wisteria seed in his cache and slipped it into the second slot.
“Nice going, big brain,” Dane said. “Now find a head to crown.”
Liko took the coronet and set it on the Green Man’s head. The god smiled and his emerald eyes closed. From beneath the lids, silvery tears began to stream.
“Watch,” Dane murmured.
The Green Man opened his eyes. Now one was blue and the other brown.
“Look at that,” Liko said. “It’s you.”
The mouth in the foliate face opened and this time, pine needles flew out. A cloud of them swirling in front of the altar, then dropping to the floor to form two words: Tinner Wheeled.
“I’m afraid it’s an annoying anagram,” Dane said. He exhaled and scrubbed at his face. “Still so much to tell you, but I have to get to work.”
Liko checked his watch. “Same.”
“We’re about halfway through the clues and it’s not even June. I’m going to slow us down a little.” Dane glanced sideways. “And I don’t mean just the game.”
Liko sighed moodily, nodding.
Dane got up, collected cups and took them to the kitchen. “If you want to be my best friend,” he called back, “put away the vacuum cleaner?”
“Sure.” But Liko just sat alone a long time, doing nothing. Unsure what he wanted to be to Dane.