Shore Leave: The Mall
Washington, D.C., November 1996
The First Night
Hazel rode with one hand off the grip from Baltimore onward, pointing at things.
She pointed at a sign that said WASHINGTON 34. She pointed at a water tower painted like a peach, which turned out to be somewhere else entirely, and at a truck carrying half a house. When the dome of the Capitol came up white over the trees on New York Avenue she pointed at that with her whole arm and yelled something the wind took away, and Sophie, holding on behind her, yelled back, "I see it," and squeezed her waist so she'd put the hand back.
She didn't put the hand back.
The hotel was eight stories of tan brick on Fifteenth Street, three blocks from the White House and not at all interested in it. The lobby had a carpet with gold fleurs-de-lis worn down to the backing in a path from the door to the desk. The clerk was a young man with a mustache he was proud of, and he looked at the two of them for a moment: one in a leather jacket with red hair blown out to twice its size, one with black braids and a scar on her cheek, both of them carrying motorcycle helmets at a quarter to two in the morning.
"Two nights," Hazel said, and counted out cash on the counter. "Maybe three. Do Not Disturb, all day, every day. If housekeeping comes in I'll cry and you'll feel bad."
He took the money. "One bed or two, ma'am?"
"One," said Sophie, very politely, and something with eight legs walked out of the cuff of her sleeve, across the back of her hand, and back in again.
The clerk watched it go. He looked up at Sophie. She smiled at him with her whole face.
"One," he agreed, and gave Hazel the key without another word.
In the elevator Hazel said, "You did that on purpose."
"He was looking at your chest."
"He was not."
"He was, a bit." Sophie leaned back against the brass rail. "Mildred thought so too."
"Which one's Mildred?"
"The one he saw."
The room was on the sixth floor and smelled of cigarettes somebody had tried hard to cover up. There were two windows facing east. Hazel pulled the curtains shut, found they didn't quite meet, and fixed it with the hotel's sewing kit and four safety pins from the bottom of her saddlebag. Then she stood back and looked at the gap where the two curtains met, now pinned tight, with the satisfaction of a woman who has done exactly this in thirty years' worth of rooms.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. We've got four hours of dark. Let's go look at a big white man in a chair."
Lincoln
The Mall at night was enormous and nearly empty. Hazel hadn't expected that.
She'd pictured something like Central Park, paths and lamps and people, and instead it was a long dark field of grass with a gravel walk down each side and the Washington Monument standing in the middle of it all, floodlit from the ground, so white against the black sky that it looked cut out of paper. The wind came across the open ground with nothing to stop it. Leaves skated along the gravel. Far off on Constitution Avenue a bus went by, lit up inside and empty.
"Huh," Hazel said.
"It's big," said Sophie.
"It's so big. Why is it so big? Who needs it this big?"
"George Washington."
"George Washington was six foot two. I looked it up." Hazel walked backward ahead of her for a while, looking up at the obelisk until her neck hurt. "This is overcompensating. I'm calling it. Somebody in eighteen-something had something to prove."
They walked west along the long reflecting pool, which was black and perfectly flat and held the monument upside down in it, white and wavering a little when the wind touched the surface. At the far end the Lincoln Memorial sat on its steps like a bank that had decided to become a temple. Light poured out between the columns.
Up close it was lit like a stage. The floodlights came from inside, from somewhere in the ceiling, and from the ground at the foot of the columns, and the whole front of the building glowed. Inside, at the back, the big marble man sat in his chair with his hands on the arms of it and looked out over the two of them and the pool and the obelisk and all of Washington with an expression Hazel decided was mostly tired.
There was nobody on the steps. There was a Park Police cruiser at the curb on the circle below, engine running, and a man in uniform leaning on its fender with a paper cup, watching the river.
Hazel started up the steps.
It was dark at the bottom, the plain dark of a city at night, and she was fine in it. The dark sat on her shoulders the way it always did, closer than it sat on anyone else, a little heavier, a coat she couldn't take off. Halfway up the floodlights caught her. She knew without looking that it was happening, because it always happened: the light came on her and the dark didn't want to let go. It hung off her. It came up the steps after her in long smears where nothing was casting it, clung around her ankles and her shoulders, stretched behind her toward the bottom of the steps like taffy being pulled and not breaking.
She kept climbing. That was the trick, mostly. You kept climbing and you didn't look down and you got into the light fast enough that it gave up and snapped back.
It snapped back at the top. She stood in the light between two columns and felt it settle.
"Ma'am?"
The officer was at the bottom of the steps. He'd put his coffee on the roof of the cruiser. He was looking up at her with one hand resting on his belt, not on anything in particular, just resting there, and his face was the face of a man trying to decide whether he had seen something.
"Evening, officer," Hazel called down.
"You alright up there?"
"Fine, thanks. Cold."
He came up a few steps. He looked at her, and then at the stone around her feet, and then at the dark at the bottom of the steps where she'd come from.
"I thought," he said, and stopped.
"The lights," Hazel said, with total confidence. "Right? They do something weird from down there. Kind of a flicker. I saw it too, from the pool. I thought I was gonna faint."
"She faints," Sophie said, coming up beside her. She had her hands in her jacket pockets and her face as serious as a church. "She's possessed, sir. We're driving her to a priest in Baltimore tomorrow."
Hazel didn't look at her. "My sister's very funny."
The officer looked from one to the other. Sophie gave him a small, polite nod, the kind she gave Primogen. He seemed to decide that whatever he'd seen, he didn't get paid enough to have seen it.
"Memorial's open all night," he said, "but you two be careful walking around out here. It's dark."
"We will, thank you, sir," said Sophie.
He went back down to his coffee. Hazel turned around and walked into the memorial and stood in front of Lincoln with her hands on her hips, and only when she was sure the man couldn't see her face did she let out a long breath through her teeth.
"A priest," she said.
"In Baltimore."
"Why Baltimore?"
"Felt specific."
Hazel looked up at Lincoln. Lincoln looked at the middle distance.
"He's got huge hands," she said eventually.
"You'd know," said Sophie.
They went to the Jefferson after that, a long cold walk around the Tidal Basin with the water on their left and the cherry trees bare and black and all leaning the same direction. Hazel did the steps quickly this time, in a run, and the dark only got as far as her knees before it gave up. Jefferson was standing, at least. She approved of that. Sophie read the words cut into the wall around him out loud in a voice like a schoolteacher's, and Hazel told her to stop, and Sophie read more of them, slower.
At the Vietnam Wall Hazel stopped talking.
It was lower than she'd thought. It started out of the grass ankle-high, at the end, a black polished edge in the dark, and as you walked along the path it grew, a few names, then a column of them, then more, until the wall was well over her head and the ground had dropped away under her and she was down in a long black cut in the earth, and everywhere she looked there were names. The lights were small, set low at the foot of the panels, and lit them from below. Her own face looked back at her out of the stone with the names running through it.
Someone had left things along the base. A pack of Marlboros, sealed. A child's drawing in a plastic sleeve, a helicopter in crayon. A pair of boots. A can of beer, unopened, with a note under it held down by a rock, and Hazel didn't read the note.
She read the names instead. They were in the order they'd died. She worked that out after a while from the dates at the top of the panels. Sixty-five. Sixty-six. Sixty-seven. Men born the same years she was, or a year or two after. Boys who'd been in the grade below her, if they'd lived in Queens. Boys who'd been at the next desk in some bank, sorting checks.
There was a directory at the end of the wall, a big book on a stand under a little roof, for finding the one you'd come for. She didn't go and open it. She hadn't come for anybody.
Sophie walked a few steps behind her the whole way and didn't say anything at all, and when they came up out of the cut at the far end into the wind, she slipped her arm through Hazel's and kept it there all the way back to Fifteenth Street.
They slept the way they always slept in a strange place, which was in a heap. Hazel on her back, Sophie mostly on top of her with her face in Hazel's neck and her braids everywhere, both of them still half in their jeans because by the time the sky outside the pinned curtains had started going gray neither of them could be bothered. Somewhere in the pile something small crawled out of Sophie's collar, considered Hazel's ear, and crawled back in.
"Tell Mildred no," Hazel said into the dark.
"That's not Mildred," said Sophie, already mostly gone. "That's Oscar."
The Second Night
The Museum of Natural History closed at five-thirty and went dark by seven. By ten, when they came and sat on a bench across Madison Drive with a bag of pretzels they weren't going to eat, the only lights in the whole long granite front were a row of small yellow ones over the staff entrance on the side, and one in a window on the ground floor where a man in a blue uniform was sitting with his feet up, reading a newspaper.
Sophie unbuttoned her cuff.
A spider walked out onto the back of her hand. It was a big one, brown and hairy, with legs as long as Hazel's thumb, and it stood there on Sophie's knuckles in the cold with its front legs lifted a little, testing the air.
Sophie held her hand close to her face and looked at it, and the spider looked at her, or at least pointed itself at her. Hazel had watched this a hundred times and it still made the back of her neck prickle. Nothing happened that you could see. Sophie just went still and stayed still, and then she bent and put her hand flat on the bench, and the spider stepped off onto the wood and down the leg and across the sidewalk and away across Madison Drive toward the museum, quick and low, and was gone into the dark at the foot of the granite.
"Which one's that?" Hazel said.
"Bartholomew."
"That one's new."
"He's not new, you just never ask."
Hazel ate a pretzel, mostly to have something to do with her hands, and then remembered she couldn't, and held it.
It took forty minutes. Hazel spent them coming up with things to say and saying them. She had a theory about the Washington Monument and a separate theory about the man with the mustache at the hotel. She had views on the Ravens. Sophie listened to all of it with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the museum wall.
At ten past eleven Sophie said, "There," and Hazel saw it: a dark speck coming down the granite, over the edge of a window ledge, down the next stretch of wall to the sidewalk.
It came back across the road the way it had gone and climbed the bench leg and walked onto Sophie's offered hand. She lifted it to her face again. She was quiet for a while.
"There's a man who smokes," she said. "At the side door. He props it with his foot. Lots of times. It's warm when he does it." She frowned, the small frown she got when the pieces didn't come together right. "There's three of them inside. One stays in the room with the window. Two walk around. Slow. They walk in a big loop and it takes them a long time."
"How long?"
"A long time, Girlie Pop. He's a spider. He doesn't have a watch."
Bartholomew went back up her sleeve. Hazel stood up and brushed pretzel salt off her jeans.
At twenty to twelve the side door opened and a heavy guard in a blue sweater came out onto the step with a cigarette in his mouth, and held the door open behind him with the heel of his shoe, and lit up.
Hazel walked up the step past him with Sophie riding on her collar, small and black and holding on hard with all eight of her legs, and the man breathed smoke out through the place where Hazel's face was and didn't blink.
Inside
At night the museum was a different building.
The lights in the big halls were on low, a quarter of what they'd be in the day, so the cases glowed and everything between the cases was shadow. Their footsteps went up into the dark under the ceiling and didn't come back. Hazel had to walk slowly, picking her way along the edges where the dark was thickest, because every time she crossed a pool of light the shadows pulled at her and stretched and she had to get across before they made a scene of it. It was like walking a dog that wanted to go a different way.
In the rotunda an elephant stood on a platform under the dome, huge, gray, mid-stride, its trunk lifted and its ears out wide, as if it had been walking across this room for forty years and was just now realizing where it was.
Sophie dropped off Hazel's collar and was a girl again by the time she hit the floor, crouching, rubbing her arms hard. She'd gone pale. She always went pale.
"Cold?" Hazel whispered.
"Shut up."
"Okay."
They went to see the diamond first because Hazel had decided on the bike that it would be first.
It sat in its case at the end of a long dark hall full of other gems, and it wasn't that big, which Hazel found she had known and was disappointed by anyway. It was blue. Deep blue, a little gray, like a bruise held up to light, set in a ring of white diamonds on a chain. It turned slowly on its stand.
Hazel put her face very close to the glass.
"Forty-five carats," she whispered. "Supposed to be cursed."
"Who says?"
"Everybody who owned it died."
"Everybody dies, Hazel."
"Not everybody." She grinned at Sophie in the glass. "Not us, look. We're doing great."
Sophie looked at her own face reflected over the blue stone, and then at Hazel's, and for a second she didn't say anything. Then she said, "You'd look awful in it. You're too orange."
"I'm tan."
"You're a pumpkin."
The dinosaurs were on the ground floor, in a long hall with a high ceiling. They stood in the half-dark on their steel rods like scaffolding with teeth: a Triceratops with its head down, ready to charge something; a stegosaurus with plates like dinner trays; the long neck of a Diplodocus going up and up and curving over, so that its tiny head hung in the shadows near the roof. Hazel walked under it with her head back.
"Look at this idiot," she said, delighted. "Look at the head on him. Look at his little head."
"Shh."
"He was eighty feet long and he had a brain the size of a walnut and he lived to be, what? A hundred? He lived longer than Lincoln. He lived longer than me." She went and stood nose to nose with the Triceratops, crouched, made her hands into horns on her forehead. "What do you think, big guy. Huh? You want some of this?"
Far down the hall, around a corner, a door opened, and a flashlight beam came out and lay along the floor.
Hazel stopped. She stayed exactly as she was, crouched, hands on her forehead. Sophie was gone; there was a moth on the Triceratops' brow horn that hadn't been there a moment ago.
The guard came along the hall slowly, the way guards walk at midnight, with his light going left and right over the bases of the skeletons and his keys moving on his belt. He walked past Hazel's crouched shape at a distance of six feet. The beam crossed the floor in front of her. Her shadow leaned toward it, and lengthened, and she held her breath for no reason at all, but the beam kept moving and the guard kept moving and he didn't look down.
He went out through the far door. It closed behind him.
The moth unfolded off the horn and was a girl sitting cross-legged on the Triceratops' platform, braids over her shoulders, looking at Hazel.
"You want some of this?" Sophie said.
"He didn't hear."
"You'd have deserved it."
The Air and Space Museum was easier and harder. Easier because a cleaning crew was working in the lobby with the doors propped wide for their carts, and Hazel just walked in with the floor polisher. Harder because the building was mostly glass. The whole front of it was windows, and the light from the Mall came in pale and gray and lay across everything in long panes, and between the panes there were bars of shadow, and she had to cross a dozen of them to get anywhere. It felt like walking down a zebra.
Planes hung from the ceiling on cables. The Wright brothers' Flyer was up there, a box kite somebody had been brave enough to sit in. A silver plane with SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS painted on the nose. A small orange one with stubby wings shaped like a bullet.
And on the floor in the middle of the hall, inside a low glass case, a cone.
It was smaller than she'd thought, too. About the size of a car, but shorter. Burned. The whole skin of it was scorched and blistered and gold in places, brown and dull in others, where it had come back down through the air on fire. There was a hatch on one side with a little window in it. The sign said COLUMBIA.
Hazel walked around it twice. Then she stood still in a bar of shadow next to it, where she was safe, with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.
"I saw this," she said.
Sophie came and stood next to her. "On TV?"
"Kind of." Hazel looked at the burned hatch. "I was supposed to be watching a door. On Delancey. There was a guy who was supposed to come out of the door, and I was on a roof across the street, and I was supposed to watch it until he did." She rocked on her heels. "There was an apartment two floors down from me with the window open, and it was hot, July, and they had the TV on, and they'd turned it so the whole family could see from the kitchen. And I could see it too. From the roof. If I looked down and to the left."
"Did you look?"
"No," Hazel said. "I was working." She pursed her lips. "I looked a little."
"How much?"
"Enough. The bit where he steps off the ladder. It was all grey and fuzzy. You couldn't see anything, really. I couldn't hear what he said." She shrugged. "Guy came out the door about twenty minutes later. It was fine. I never told him."
Sophie didn't ask who him was. She didn't need to.
"You still saw it," she said.
"I still saw it."
They stood there a while longer, the two of them, in a bar of shadow next to a burned cone that had been to the moon, and outside on the Mall the wind moved and nobody came.
The Flag
The Museum of American History had a pendulum in it.
Hazel heard it before she saw it, a small hollow clack, regular as a clock, echoing up a three-story atrium in the middle of the building. When they came around the corner it was there: a brass ball the size of a melon on a cable so long it went all the way up out of sight, swinging slowly over a pit in the floor. In a circle around the edge of the pit stood a ring of little red pegs, and as they watched, the ball came down the end of its swing and knocked one over.
Clack.
"What's it doing?" said Hazel.
"Proving the earth turns," said Sophie, who had read the sign.
"The earth turns?"
"Hazel."
"I'm kidding. Mostly." She leaned on the rail and watched it go. "It's been knocking those over all night? Just on its own? Nobody watching?"
"Every night."
"That's kind of sad."
"It's a pendulum."
On the wall above the pendulum, two stories up, there was a painting. It covered almost the whole wall: a great dim picture of a flag waving over a fort, with smoke and a dawn sky behind it. It took Hazel a minute to understand that the painting wasn't on the wall. It hung in front of something.
"That's it," she said. "That's the flag. It's behind that."
There was a sign on the rail about it. The flag that had flown over Fort McHenry in 1814, the one the anthem was about, thirty feet by forty-two. It was too fragile for light, so it was kept behind a protective panel, which was lowered for a few minutes every hour during museum hours so visitors could see it.
"It goes up," said Hazel. "The panel. It goes up and down."
"During museum hours."
"There's gotta be a switch."
Sophie looked at her.
There was a switch.
It was in a gray metal box on the wall of a little service corridor that went off behind the atrium, where the stairs went up. The box had a padlock on it, an old Master lock, the kind Hazel had been opening with a hairpin and a small screwdriver since before Sophie was born. Inside the box was a panel of buttons and dials with small typed labels, and a key switch, which was turned to OFF, and a little brass key, which was hanging on a hook right next to it.
"That's just irresponsible," Hazel whispered, delighted.
"Hazel."
"I just want to see it. Just for a second. Just up and down."
"Hazel, the guards."
"The guards are on the other side of the building. You said."
"Bartholomew said."
"Bartholomew is a very reliable spider." She put the little brass key in the switch and turned it to ON, and a small green bulb lit up above it. There was a button below that said RAISE. She looked at Sophie. Sophie looked back at her with her mouth set in a line.
Hazel pressed RAISE.
Somewhere above them a motor woke up with a deep hum. They went out to the rail together and watched the great dim painting begin, very slowly, to rise.
Behind it, as it went up, there was the flag.
It was enormous, and faded, and gray-blue and gray-red rather than red and blue, and it was torn. Whole pieces were missing out of one end, the stripes stopping in ragged lines. It was mounted flat on the wall behind a scrim and lit very low, and it hung there two stories over the pendulum pit in the half-dark, huge and quiet and exhausted, like it had been holding something up a long time.
Hazel stopped breathing, which she didn't need to do anyway.
And then, from speakers set in the ceiling, from all four corners of the atrium at once, an orchestra started playing the national anthem.
It was loud. It was impossibly, enormously loud. It had been set for a museum full of tourists in the middle of the afternoon and now it rolled out into an empty building at a quarter past three in the morning and rang off the marble and the glass and the brass ball of the pendulum, and went up through all three stories, every brass instrument in it hitting the walls at once.
"Oh say can you see," sang a choir, enormously.
"Oh no," said Hazel.
Sophie was already gone. A small black spider went up the wall beside the corridor door and into the corner of the ceiling, very fast.
Hazel ran back to the box. She hit the button that said LOWER, and the motor changed its tone and went on humming, and the painting stopped and started to come down again, and the choir went right on singing about the rockets' red glare. There wasn't a button that said STOP SINGING. She turned the key back to OFF. The music didn't care.
Doors were banging somewhere. Running feet. Two flashlight beams came round the far end of the atrium, swinging, and then a third, and a man's voice was shouting, "Where's it coming from? Where's it coming from? Ray, the box, check the box!"
Hazel went flat against the wall of the corridor, in the dark, and stayed there.
The guard called Ray came down the corridor at a run. He was young, with his tie flapping and his flashlight swinging wildly, and he came straight toward the box, straight at her. She didn't move. He was going to come within a foot of her. That was fine. She'd had men walk closer. They looked straight through her, every time. Nobody ever saw anything.
His flashlight swung across the corridor wall and hit her.
Not her. She wasn't there for him. But the beam went over the wall where she was pressed, and the dark around her didn't want to let it. The shadow on the wall stretched. It reached out from her shoulders across the lit circle of the flashlight like ink running uphill, and pulled the edges of the light in toward her, and wrapped around the place where she stood, so that in the middle of his bright beam there was a dark shape, man-sized, woman-sized, that wasn't cast by anything.
Ray stopped dead.
The choir was getting to the land of the free.
He held the light on the wall with both hands. The beam shook. The dark shape on the wall shook with it, clinging, reaching, and Hazel thought, very clearly, Well, shit.
She moved. Not much. Just along the wall, one step, into the deeper dark by the stairwell door where his light didn't reach, and the shadow let go of the light all at once and snapped back after her, and the wall in his beam was just a wall. Plain painted cinderblock. A fire extinguisher. A sign about exits.
Ray made a noise in his throat.
Behind him the second guard came running up the corridor. "Ray! Ray. Did you get it?"
"There was something," Ray said. His voice had gone high. "There was something on the wall."
"What?"
"On the wall. In the light. There was something on the wall, it moved, I saw it move."
"Ray, turn the damn music off."
The home of the brave arrived, rang off everything in the building, and stopped. The silence afterward was enormous. Somewhere behind them in the atrium, unbothered, the pendulum knocked over another peg.
Clack.
Hazel was out the stairwell door and down a flight and out through a fire exit into the alley behind the museum before Ray had finished explaining. The fire exit didn't have an alarm on it. Bartholomew had been thorough.
She stood in the alley in the cold with her back against the wall and her heart not beating, and her hands were shaking, and she was laughing so hard she had to bend over.
Sophie wasn't there.
Waiting
She came out of the dark at the end of the alley ten minutes later, a girl again, rubbing her arms, braids coming loose. She didn't say anything. She came and stood next to Hazel and looked at her.
"I know," said Hazel.
"The national anthem."
"I know."
"At three in the morning."
"I didn't know it sang! There wasn't a sign that said it sang!"
"There was. On the rail. It said 'accompanied by a recording of the anthem'."
Hazel stopped laughing. "There was not."
"There was, Girlie Pop. I read it to you."
"You did not."
"You weren't listening. You were looking at the pendulum." Sophie leaned on the wall beside her and pushed a loose braid back. Then she frowned and touched the back of her collar, and then the other side, and checked her cuffs, both of them.
"What?"
"Eustace."
"Who's Eustace?"
"He was on the wall. In the corner. When the man came." She was very still. "He didn't come back down with me. I think he went on the man."
Hazel straightened up off the wall. "On the guard?"
"On his collar."
"Can you call him?"
Sophie gave her a look that said she'd been asked that before and would be asked it again for the rest of her unlife. "He's a spider, Hazel. He comes back when he comes back."
They waited.
They went around to the front of the museum and sat on the steps across Constitution Avenue, where they could see the staff door, and they waited. Two Park Police cruisers came and parked out front with their lights going, red and blue sweeping over the granite, and Hazel scooted back into the deep shadow of a pillar and stayed there. Men went in and out. A man in a suit arrived in a sedan, and went in, and came out, and stood on the steps with his hands on his hips and talked to one of the officers for a long time, pointing up at the building. The cruisers left. The sedan stayed.
At five-ten the sky over the Capitol had started to go the color of dishwater.
"Soph."
"I know."
"We've got maybe forty minutes. Maybe less."
"I know."
"We can come back for him tomorrow."
"He won't be here tomorrow. He'll go looking for me. He'll go to the last place he smelled me and I won't be there." Sophie didn't take her eyes off the door. "He'll get lost."
Hazel looked at her sideways. Sophie was sitting with her hands in her lap and her shoulders straight, as polite and still as the night they'd stood in front of the Baltimore Prince, and Hazel didn't say anything else.
At five-twenty-two the staff door opened and a guard came out. It was Ray. He had his coat on and his tie in his pocket, and he stood on the step and lit a cigarette with hands that shook so badly it took him three matches, and he looked up and down Constitution Avenue the way someone does when they're checking that a street is still where they left it.
A small black speck went down the back of his coat, down the leg of his trousers, onto the step, and away across the sidewalk.
It took Eustace eleven minutes to cross Constitution Avenue. Hazel watched every one of them. A street sweeper went by and he sat flat in a crack in the asphalt until it was gone. The sky got lighter. Sophie went down to the curb and crouched there with her hand flat on the cold concrete and didn't move at all, and when he finally came up over the edge of the curb and onto her fingers she closed her hand around him very gently and held it against her chest.
They made the hotel at five-fifty-one with Hazel's eyes streaming and the sky over Fifteenth Street gone pink, and the clerk with the mustache looked up from his desk to see them come running through the lobby and decided, visibly, not to ask.
Eustace
Sophie listened to him in the bathroom with the door shut, sitting on the edge of the tub, because she said he was shy. Hazel lay on the bed in the gray light coming around the pinned curtains and waited.
When Sophie came out she climbed onto the bed and lay down across Hazel's stomach, sideways, with her head on the far pillow and her boots still on, and looked at the ceiling.
"Well?" said Hazel.
"He's fine."
"That's not what I meant."
"There was a room. Small. Hot, a radiator. Lots of shouting. Lots of men." Sophie's voice went slow, the way it did when she was reading the pieces. "Ray was very scared. He smelled like it the whole time. He kept doing this." She held up one hand flat and made it shake. "Pointing. And then there was another man, older, who laughed at him. A lot. Hit the desk while he was laughing. Eustace didn't like that, it went all through the floor. And then the man in the suit came, and he was very angry, but not at Ray, at the box. He kept tapping on a piece of paper. Hard. And Ray just stood there."
Hazel lay with her hands on Sophie's back and looked at the ceiling too.
"So they think it's the box," she said.
"They think it's the box. And Ray thinks it's ghosts."
"Poor Ray."
"Poor Ray," Sophie agreed. She was quiet a moment. Then she said, "You stopped breathing. When it went up."
"I don't breathe."
"You stopped not breathing harder."
Hazel didn't say anything to that.
Sophie rolled her head on the pillow and looked at her upside down. "Was it worth it?"
"Soph. It was a thirty foot flag that's been around since eighteen-fourteen and it's got holes in it and it's still up on the wall." Hazel shut her eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, it was worth it."
The next evening they woke up in a heap again, with the room gone dark and somebody's television going in the next room. Hazel went down to the lobby in her socks to get a newspaper out of the machine, and came back up with it and threw it on the bed.
It was in the Metro section, page six, two inches long at the bottom of a column. Smithsonian Alarm Plays Anthem at 3 A.M. An electrical fault in the American History museum's flag display had activated the panel and the sound system overnight. No damage to the flag. Nothing missing. A spokesman said the control box would be replaced. One guard had been sent home early.
Sophie read it out loud, twice, the second time in the voice of a choir. Then she rolled onto her back with the paper over her face and said through it, with tremendous satisfaction, "Hazel Durer. Patriot."
"Shut up."
"Home of the brave."
"I will throw you out the window."
"Land of the free," sang Sophie, at full volume, flat, into the newspaper, and somewhere under her collar something small with eight legs went to hide.