“No more,” Berit says after every new addition, but she saves scraps for the dogs. Jamie has a recurring nightmare in which he is made to choose between shooting Marian and shooting a dog. He will not eat meat. “You will die with no meat,” Berit says, and yet Jamie lives on.
He’d been reassured when, in the midst of all the ruckus, Gilda had reached up and coolly smoothed her hair back into place.
Marian, during her turn at Gilda’s window, had been transfixed by how the man （a different man from Jamie’s） had become a wild beast, how his face had twisted and his back arched, how he’d shoved Gilda up the bed and gobbled blindly between her legs. Eventually, after he had mounted her the way a dog or elk would, he went still. The beast vanished, and he became a man again, a friendly-looking man straightening his clothes. Marian began to study men after that—shopkeepers, neighbors, Wallace’s friends, Wallace, the milkman, the postman—peering too intently into faces, looking for beasts.
Wallace knows Marian and Jamie slip off on adventures. He chooses not to go past the vaguest knowing, not to worry they might not return. He has adventures of his own. Sometimes he goes off after dark to find a poker game, a drink in a speakeasy or roadhouse, a woman. He is a quiet drunk but an ardent one.
A check arrives from a bank in Seattle, a decent sum. A letter with it explains that Mr. Addison Graves wishes money to be sent periodically for the upkeep of the children. Wallace goes out and loses most of it right away in a roadhouse cardroom. （A larger check had come once, when the children were very small—their settlement from the estate of their maternal grandfather. He’d used it to settle a debt.） On his way home, at dawn, he stops and immerses himself in the oxbow pond where he’d taken Addison, but the water is cold and tea-brown and he does not feel cleansed, only scummy and sodden. Sullenly, floating, he mulls over whether the money from Addison was newly earned or from some reserve of his savings. He thinks his brother should have known better than to send him so much money at once, but then he remembers Addison knows nothing of his gambling.
The cottage that was meant for Addison glows at night like a sturdy, neighborly moon because Marian has made it her place. After her father’s brief visit, she’d unpacked all the crates herself. Such wonders to be sorted through: Wallace’s paintings, books of all thicknesses and dimensions, and then the glorious, bewildering array of exotic souvenirs. Some were self-explanatory （rugs, vases） and others were mysterious, such as the seven-foot-long, sharp-ended, spiraled animal horn wrapped in burlap and packed in a long tube all its own. She’d propped the horn in a corner behind the stove, left it leaning there like the neglected staff of a sorcerer. She wishes she could imagine her father buying, say, a particular red-and-black wooden bowl, but she doesn’t know what sort of scene to visualize. A bustling city? A lonely fishing village? A hot place? A cold place? Why had he chosen this bowl of all the bowls in the world?
She’d stacked the books in teetering columns against one wall. She would read them, she decided, one after the other, in the order they were stacked, and she begins to do this shortly after her tenth birthday. Here and there, after she’s been working on Wallace’s car or mending bicycles for other children, she leaves some streaks of grease on the pages, but she decides her father is the kind of man who wouldn’t mind. During the day, she carries a book with her, to school or into the hills. In the evenings, she goes to the cottage and reads in the armchair by the stove. Had her father sat in it even once? Before this windfall of books, she had not been a reader and is unpracticed at sitting still for so long.
The first volume on the first stack, not quite by chance, is Dracula, and, like her mother, she has distressing dreams about Renfield, the lunatic who feeds flies to spiders and spiders to birds and, when he can’t obtain a cat to eat the birds, eats them himself, alive. She dreams about the beast with Gilda, and in the dream she knows the beast is Renfield, the devourer. There is no one, of course, who can tell her that her mother also had been frightened by the idea of such an appetite. No one had ever known.
Among the books are novels and some collections of verse and quite a few volumes of illustrations of plants and birds and animals labeled in Latin that she tells Jamie he may come and look at but may not take anywhere. There is a collection of Shakespeare and a fat dictionary that she keeps nearby for words she doesn’t know. But mostly there are accounts of journeys. She reads about storms and wrecks, pirates and armadas, crews forced to eat their comrades. （Renfield reappears in her dreams.） She reads about Tahitian mountains rising from warm seas, their emerald summits wreathed with cloud, about the forbidding Himalayas and the high pastures of the Alps where cowbells toll. She reads about James Cook and Charles Darwin and Mary Kingsley and Richard Henry Dana and about Lewis and Clark walking through the very same valley where she lives. She reads about the winds in the Strait of Magellan that can push a ship backward at such speeds its prow leaves a wake, winds that blow Arabian sand hundreds of miles out to sea in choking orange clouds. She reads about the Congo and the Nile and the Yangtze and the Amazon. She reads about wild, naked children in hot climates who play games of looking and touching not unlike those Caleb sometimes devises when Jamie isn’t around. She reads about waves towering like mountains, about maddening calms, circling sharks, whales that leap free of the ocean, volcanoes that ooze fire. There are no books among them about little girls like herself, but she does not notice.