Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [68]
No one is from here, Nina had said. Once upon a time this girl lived in the real world, and she came into the woods looking for something. And what she found was this.
“I’ll buy them!” Hazel said. “How much do you need?” She began to shrug off her backpack.
“Fifty kroner,” the girl said.
“Oh.”
“It’s all right,” said the girl. “The matches are magic.”
“They are?” Hazel asked warily.
“Yes. I never knew. But look!” She stared back into the flame.
Hazel followed her eyes. She saw nothing but dancing fire against a blue girl. “What are you looking at?”
“That’s my grandmother,” the girl said, voice hushed, eyes glued to the flame. “She’s made dinner. She makes the most wonderful turkey, do you smell it?” The girl was staring into the fading flame as if inside it was the secret truth of the world. But they were ordinary matches, and her visions were the deluded comfort of a dying mind.
Hazel could feel her heart lose its solidity and diffuse slowly in her chest. She had a strong urge to grab a chunk of her own hair and pull it as hard she could. “Don’t you see it?” asked the girl, voice suddenly wavering.
Hazel wanted to tell her no, to tell her to stop wondering at phantoms, because she was freezing to death and maybe starving, and they needed to find someone who could help her. But . . .
“Yes,” she whispered. “I see it. It’s beautiful. Where does your grandmother live?”
“Up there.” The girl pointed to the sky.
“Oh,” Hazel said again.
She looked at the girl and the matches. They had been real, useful things once.
And then Hazel knew what she had to do.
“Stay still,” she whispered.
She removed her green jacket, then gently took the smoking match out of the girl’s hand. She dressed the girl in the jacket, one arm at a time, and zipped it up. She pulled off her hat and mittens, then placed the hat on the girl’s head and the mittens on her hands.
The girl hugged the jacket around herself. Her eyes widened and she stared at Hazel.
“It’s warm, right?” Hazel said, trying to control her voice. “It’s a nice jacket.”
The girl nodded slowly. “Aren’t you cold?” she whispered.
Yes. “No,” she said. “I don’t have much farther to go.”
“Why are you doing this?” The girl looked so bewildered, like kindness was unfathomable to her, and that broke Hazel’s heart more than anything.
“Here,” Hazel said, handing her one of the energy bars. “I have one more. You need to eat it.”
The air had no trouble working its way through Hazel’s shirt, and she felt the bite of cold on her bare hands. She blinked it away.
“There’s one more thing.”
Hazel reached over to the jacket and put her hand on the zipped-up pocket, feeling the familiar outline of the whistle. She unzipped the pocket and gave the whistle an almost invisible caress with her thumb. Then she blew into it three times, just as she learned to at school, and presented it to the girl.
“Blow on this,” she said. “Three times, every few minutes. A boy will come. His name is Ben, and he’ll help you. You tell him what happened. You tell him I gave you this. He’ll take care of you. You can trust him.”
Those were all the real things Hazel had left, other than the baseball—which was just a fantasy, really.
The girl blinked at her, and then thrust the bunch of matches into her hand. “Take these,” she said. “It’s the only payment I have.”
“No, you have to sell them.”
“Please,” she said. “Take them. Please take them.”
“Okay,” Hazel said, if only to quiet her. “Okay.”
The girl handed her the matches and the tinderbox. The wind stirred, and Hazel felt the cold tugging at her, trying to pull her to it. She belonged to it now.
Hazel opened her mouth to find some way to say good-bye, when the girl’s hand flew to the apron pockets that hung down below Hazel’s jacket. “I have something else!” she said.
“I don’t—”
“Take it,” she said, pulling a shiny something out of her pocket. “It shows you things, like the matches. But this shows you the truth. It shows you the way things