She ought to head back, what with the household in such a state. But before she turns her steps toward Lei Leila’ani’s, Elphie sidles toward the lagoon, then takes the shortcut, threading her way across the watered allotments to the far side. She hurries up the slope. Where usually she would move from blind to blind, those stands of bamboo and giant fern, today she makes the shortest path, out in the open, to the grove of cedars that has been her private study. Hers and Pari’isi To’or’s.
The right thing would be for To’or to be waiting for her as usual. But perhaps his uncle has caught wind of the secret tutorial and forbidden To’or to attend. The hill is bare of consolation. Of any sort.
Elphie whirls in the breeze lifting off the water, stretching her arms out on either side like the whirligig seed of the swamp maple. Winged seeds, able to fly on the breeze. Could she make herself a pair of wings, she could find—find what? Go high enough to see the world, see where Neri-neri and Lollo-lollo went? See where To’or is hiding from her, and call him out, if only to say good-bye? She has no wings to fly, no lift—only ambition.
The gymnastics of whirling in desperation, they blur everything; she is dizzy. Life reduced to a set of edges streaking past in colored ribbons. Tears come and she lets them, and hang the hurt. Hurting helps.
When she stops, Elphie becomes aware of a new sense of isolation. The landscape, unraveled into fuzzed belts of color, has come back together. It now seems a glassy globe. She isn’t peering into it, to see the future or the past. She is inside, she is the one locked inside the world. She gets this for the first time. From the cedar branches above her, to the rice terraces, the agriculture, the humming hive of Ovvels, and the marshes and riverines and jungles from which the family had emerged and to which it will soon return: This is her prison. With a high blue lid, the sky, and a deep reflective floor, the water of the lagoon.
Caught inside the world and inside herself: a double prison. She may never escape.
Realizing this in a profound way, perhaps the first existential thought she’s ever articulated for herself, she realizes there’s no point in waiting for the feelings to lift. The next job of life is to live with these feelings. To work, then, toward the next brave thing.
When she gets back to the house, she corners her father in his prayer cell. She speaks in a low voice. “You aren’t seriously thinking of letting Lei Leila’ani come with us when we go tomorrow?” she asks him.
She wonders if he is drunk. He is something. Wracked, to say the least. His eyes are fringed with glue and redness. He can’t bring himself to put his arguments into words.
“Look,” she says. “If Lei leaves with us, her fellow Ovvelians will conclude she was part of the problem. She’d never be able to come back. This is her home; we aren’t her home. For her sake, we have to leave without her knowing. It’s the right thing to do. We can’t steal her security from her.”
Frex isn’t so far gone in distress to catch this insincerity. Elphie, concerned about the kindest thing to do? He raises an eyebrow and runs a hand with dirty fingernails through his beard.
“She might think she belongs with us,” Elphie continues. “You might even think that. But she doesn’t. She can’t begin to manage Shell. The best course of action is to slip away in the morning before she is up. She sleeps very heavily as you know. Otherwise, we’d have breakfast once in a while. We’ll get up before dawn. This is one time Shell will behave. He doesn’t want her as a fake mother anymore than—that anyone else does.”
“She’s a good woman,” says Frex, hopelessly.
“You let her come with us, you take her goodness away from her, for she’s only good in the eyes of her neighbors.”
“You’re ferocious and ungenerous, Elphaba. You have no reason to be jealous of her.”
“You’d be miserable if you stole her good name from her in exchange for her company. While she can always rent out her house to other lodgers after we are gone. She’s good at looking after her own interests.”
They stare at each other for a while that goes on too long, but neither can break the gaze.
The landlady is snoring softly behind her half-opened door when Frex leaves behind the final item once belonging to Melena, a brocaded purse in which he tucks a small fold of bills as a final payment. He doesn’t notice Shell wheel back and pocket half of the cash.
The roofs tilt and wink, lifting above a sea of lagoon vapor.
Frex and Nessa refuse to turn to look at Ovvels one last time. Too proud. Shell and Elphie turn, though. Elphie can’t make out Lei’s house, only the clot of trees that mark her neighborhood. Shell says a bad word. Elphie holds his hand. Nanny walks with surprising vigor, restored to purpose now that Lei Leila’ani is out of the picture.
An unfamiliar sense of family purpose and conviviality.
“I know you did it,” says Nessa to Shell, when their father has strode far enough ahead to be out of earshot.
“Did what?” Shell’s retort is brave and taunting.
“Broke that porcelain tea set,” says Nessa. Elphie looks away.
“I didn’t, you did,” says Shell. “You hexed them over the side of the rail because you were angry you couldn’t pick up a teacup by yourself.”
“I never would,” says Nessa, “and my great moral strength is that I don’t lie, either. A paradox: I may not have arms, but I am armed with the truth.”
“Oh, please,” mutters Elphie.
“Even if I did,” says Shell, “you prolly hexed me to do it. You can’t deny that. Even if you don’t ’member. You coulda hexed me in your sleep.”
The arrogant little kid has got his sister cornered. She bites her lower lip until it bleeds, and Nanny has to come over and clean her chin. “If I didn’t have to love you, I would so hate you,” Nessa says to Shell.
“Too bad,” he says cheerily. He’s deflected attention from the possibility that he had committed all those other small crimes, too, and he goes skipping ahead on the path, free as sin itself.