The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [22]
Faith went to Phoebe and knelt beside her. As Phoebe clung to her sister, she felt the rapid pulse of her heart. “Is it morning?” she asked.
“Almost,” Faith said, breathless. Her cheeks were flushed. A tiny painted rainbow began above her left eye and curved around her cheekbone. “We’re making breakfast to eat on the roof and watch the sunrise.”
“What about Mrs. M.?” Phoebe said.
“She’s sleeping,” Faith whispered, crossing her fingers. “I told her I was staying overnight at Abby’s house.”
The strangers watched Phoebe very kindly, as if the mere sight of her standing there in her nightgown were somehow pleasing. Finding herself at the center of attention gave Phoebe a jittery pleasure. One man wore a magician’s crimson velvet cape and held in his palm two silver balls, which made dense clicking noises as he rolled them together. Another man looked like Jesus, in his thick beard and sandals. He’d been rolling skinny yellow cigarettes; now he lit one so the tobacco sputtered and crackled, took a puff, then offered it to his neighbor. “What a beautiful kid,” said Jesus, breathing odd, sweet-smelling smoke. Phoebe blushed to the neck.
“C’mere, beautiful,” Wolf said, pulling a chair to the stove. “Come help the chef.”
Shyly Phoebe approached him. In the candlelight Wolf looked like a warrior chief, deeply tanned even to his hands. His skin had a wonderful smell, like her father’s leather boots when he’d left them out in the sun. Wolf lifted Phoebe onto the chair, his warm hands on her ribs. Phoebe noticed a tiny gold hoop in his earlobe.
The eggs were warm, as if they’d just been laid. Phoebe cracked a luminous shell, letting the yolk and white slide into a glass bowl. Wolf added vegetables to the buttered pan, and the blend of smells became intoxicating: sweet cigarette smoke, buttery vegetables, a rich, oily scent of the candles. The White Witch rose from her chair and began to dance, floating in the music as if it were liquid. The sunburned Hatter snored gently, his top hat upright beside his head on the kitchen table. The Queen of Spades perched on the lap of a man in a harlequin shirt, a Joker from the same pack of cards she was queen of.
“Who are they?” Phoebe whispered to Faith.
Faith shook her head, gazing into the room. “I don’t know,” she said.
“But where did they come from? How did you find them?”
“They found us,” Faith said. “Or we found each other, I guess. At the Invisible Circus. We were all at the Invisible Circus.”
It made perfect sense—these costumes, the crazy good humor of everyone. Phoebe loved the circus, and was crestfallen that her sister would go to one and not bring her. “A three-ring circus?” she asked.
Faith smiled, turning to Wolf. “Was it?”
“Bigger,” Wolf said. “Four-ring, I’d say. Maybe five.”
“Five rings!” Phoebe turned away in fury.
“Oh no,” Faith said. “She thinks—no, Phoebe, it wasn’t—they called it a circus, but it was just a party, a big party in a church. Then it got closed down.”
“No animals?” Phoebe said warily.
“No, nothing like that at all,” Faith said. “More like a grownups’ funhouse.”
Phoebe thought of Playland, an old funhouse out by the ruined Sutro Baths where their father used to take them: a revolving tunnel you couldn’t walk through without falling and bruising your knees, the blasts of air that shot up through tiny holes in the floor. There were long, perilous slides of polished wood that you descended on potato sacks, getting raw white welts where your skin touched the wood. Faith and their father had loved going to Playland, but beneath its smiling good cheer Phoebe sensed a grimacing, sinister core.
Faith took Phoebe’s hands in her own. “Something is happening,” she said softly. “Can you feel it?”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but I feel it. Like this vibration underground.” Her voice trembled, as if the vibration were running through her body.
“What are you talking about?” Phoebe said.
“Everything’s changing,” Faith said. “Everything’s going to be different.”
Things had already changed—too much. “I like