The House That Wasn't There

by Elana K. Arnold

  “Oh,” said Oak, “those are for the kittens!”

  Alder coughed and choked, but it was too late—he’d already chewed and started to swallow, and there was nowhere for the tuna treat to go but down. Oak quickly poured him some tea and handed him the cup.

  Alder took a big swig of tea, swishing it around in his cheeks like mouthwash. At last, he swallowed. “Gross,” he said.

  “Um, yeah,” said Oak. “I don’t think they use human-grade tuna in cat treats. Here,” she said. “Have a sandwich.”

  Alder sat on the couch and bit into the sandwich—a bit dubiously at first, which Oak understood, after the cat treat. Oak poured a cup of tea for herself and poured a little cream into a shallow bowl for each kitten. They were nowhere to be found, and for a moment, Oak felt certain that they’d somehow escaped again.

  She went through the house, calling, “Here, kitty, kitty! Here, kitty!”

  They weren’t in the kitchen, nor her bedroom, and the doors to her parents’ bedroom and the office were both closed. The bathroom was empty.

  “Kitties! Walnut! Fern!” Oak tried to make her voice playful and sweet, but panic set it on edge, made it dissonant.

  There was a movement from Alder’s backpack, where he’d shrugged it off in the entry hall. Then an orange-striped tail and rump backed out of it. Walnut! Then, shaking her way out of the bag, came Fern as well.

  Oak could have melted with relief. “You bad kitties,” she admonished, but her voice was light now, happy. She picked up Alder’s backpack to zip it, so the cats couldn’t get inside again.

  There, in the shadow of the bag, was a golden glint.

  Oak peeked inside. It was something rectangular, covered in cloth. She knew it wasn’t polite to rummage through someone else’s stuff, but even still, she reached in and pulled it out. Then she gasped.

  There it was—a plain black book, slightly smaller than most books, with gilded letters in yellow gold down its spine: Feline Teleportation.

  Chapter 19

  The cream cheese and salmon sandwiches were quite good. Alder took another happy bite. He heard the kittens rustling around, and then they came running wildly into the living room, one long burst of orange.

  Behind him, in the entry hall, Oak was fussing around with something; Alder could hear her.

  “Alder,” Oak said, and her voice sounded . . . different. It was soft, and very serious, as if she had seen a ghost. “Where did you get this?”

  He turned around. She was standing in the doorway to the living room, holding a book—the one he’d brought to school that morning to give to her. “Oh,” he said. “That’s for you. To say sorry for being such a jerk the other day. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “It seemed to have your name on it.”

  Oak walked slowly into the room. She lowered herself onto the couch next to Alder. “What do you mean, it had my name on it?” She set the book on the coffee table, but her gaze did not leave its cover.

  “It’s just an expression,” Alder said. “I know it’s probably silly, like a joke book or something, but its title made me think of what happened the other day. Oak, are you okay?”

  “Where did you get this?” Oak said again.

  “My mom bought it last week, at the library’s book sale,” Alder said. “She brought it home with a bunch of other books, and she told me I could have as many of them as I wanted. And then, after what happened the other day in the cafeteria . . .” Alder cleared his throat and tried again, setting the sandwich back on the plate. “After what I did last week, when I ignored you at the table . . . well, I felt bad, and I wanted to give you something. And I saw this book, and I don’t know why, I just felt like you should have it. Like it should be yours. So I brought it over.” He paused. “You don’t like it?”

  Slowly, Oak blew out her breath. She reached over and poked the book, as if maybe she expected it to move.

  When she looked up at him, her eyes were full wonder.

  His voice came out in a whisper. “Oak,” he said again. “Are you all right?”

  “It barely seems possible,” she said, and her voice was quiet too. “What are the odds?”

  Normally, it would make Alder very cranky if he asked someone questions and they didn’t get answered, but for some reason, this felt different. It felt like, when the answer came, it would be worth waiting for. And so he waited.

  He didn’t have to wait terribly long. No more than a few seconds, really. And then Oak blinked, as if to clear her vision, as if to bring herself back to the moment.

  “Okay,” she said. “Listen.”

  And then she told him about how she had arranged all their family books in a big rainbow on their bookshelf, with the black books in the bottom right corner, and then her mother had rearranged them (Oak actually said “disarranged,” which sounded worse to Alder than “rearranged”), and how Oak had gone looking for a book later whose title she couldn’t remember—“Only that it had the word Feline in it,” she said, and that it was a gift that her father had given her mother—but she couldn’t find it anywhere. Her mother, Oak said, had told her that she’d boxed up some of the books to donate to the library’s book sale, and so Oak had ridden her bike all the way to the library on Saturday, only to find that she was too late, that the sale was over and the books were all gone.

  “My mom brought this book home last week,” Alder murmured. “Remember? When you were over at my house? And she came in with a stack of books from the library? That book”—Alder pointed at the book, but he didn’t touch it; actually, it made him a little nervous now—“was in the stack! It was sitting in my house the whole time. While you were searching your house for it. While you were riding to the library to find it.”

  “All this time,” said Oak, her voice reverent, “and it was right next door.”

  She looked up and straight at Alder. He looked straight at her. Her eyes, he noticed, were a deep dark brown.

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and something like a jolt of electricity passed between them. The kittens seemed to notice, for they began meowing in unison, and they jumped up on the couch and wove back and forth between Alder and Oak, purring and headbutting, as if they felt the burst of energy and wanted to be a part of it.

  “Oak,” said Alder, “where did you say your dad got this book?”

  “He brought it home from a business trip he took,” Oak said. “He said he found it in some weird shop.”

  “I don’t suppose . . . ,” said Alder, “by any chance, was the shop in Seattle?”

  “How did you know that?” Oak asked.

  Alder had the strangest feeling, like he was almost afraid to ask the next question, but he did anyway. “Could it have been the Ballyhoo Curiosity Shop?”

  Oak’s eyes went round, and the kittens’ meowing grew louder, as if they were joined in song. “Is that where . . . where your mom and dad found Mort?”

  Alder simply nodded.

  There was nothing else to say for a while. Oak and Alder just stared at each other, and at the book. The kittens, whose calls seemed to crescendo, began to lick each other’s heads.

  “I suppose sometimes weird things just happen,” Alder suggested.

  “Yes,” said Oak. “But it seems like lots of weird things are happening to us.”

  “The house,” said Alder, his voice dropping to a whisper. “And Mort.”

  Oak nodded. “And before that, the kittens.”

  That’s right. The kittens were from the same litter, separated and then reunited here, as next-door neighbors.

  “What do you think we should do?” Alder asked.

  “I think,” said Oak, “that we should read the book.”

  They turned together to look at the book. It had no dust jacket; it was matte black, cloth covered, and no taller than a hand. There were no words at all on the front or back cover, only along the spine, which read Feline Teleportation in gold letters that caught the light and shimmered.

  Fern had curled int
o a ball in Alder’s lap; she purred. Walnut had curled into a ball in Oak’s lap; he purred, too.

  Alder watched as Oak reached out for the book; she hesitated for a moment, her hand hovering above it, as if she were afraid, but then she picked it up. She settled back into the couch, and Alder settled behind her. Fern was a warm, pleasant weight in his lap. He watched Oak’s hands as she flipped open the book.

  The first page read, simply:

  FELINE TELEPORTATION

  A Guide

  Edith Phipps, PhD

  Oak turned the page; there was a table of contents, which interested Alder, but Oak turned right past it to the next page, which read:

  INTRODUCTION

  A Brief History of the Art and Magic of Feline Travel through Time and Space

  Welcome, dear reader. If this book has found its way to you, consider yourself lucky. After all, who among us truly finds what we desire? Not many, I’d wager.

  Now, I can practically feel your dubiousness radiating across the space-time continuum. “Teleporting cats?” you are most likely mumbling, if not aloud, then at least in your head. For these days, we like to think that we are beyond the epoch of believing in such things. But ask yourself: When was the last time you encountered something for which you could find no plausible explanation? And is it that hard to accept that, perhaps, the truest explanation is an implausible one? Implausible, after all, is not the same as impossible.

  “What’s ‘implausible’?” Alder asked.

  “Not likely to be true,” Oak answered.

  “Oh,” said Alder, and he returned to the page.

  If you doubt the veracity of this subject matter, then you are not alone. My own peers in the scientific community seem to find my research in this area to be “laughable” (their repeated words, not mine). But if today’s “top” science minds cannot expand enough to consider the wonders of feline parallel universe teleportation, then perhaps, dear reader, yours can.

  “That’s a bunch of words I don’t really understand,” Alder said.

  “It means that other scientists don’t believe in her research about cats teleporting,” said Oak. “Now shhh.”

  The unique ability of cats to teleport to parallel universes and hidden spaces has been known by a few discerning human beings over the past epochs. Indeed, the earliest record of this feline proclivity was made by ancient Egyptians; unfortunately, that body of research was lost when the libraries at Alexandria burned. A tragedy for a scientist such as myself, most definitely. But not such a tragedy, I’d wager, for felines; they are, after all, a secretive society, and I would not entirely dismiss the possibility that the cats themselves lit fire to the libraries in order to protect their fiercely guarded knowledge.

  It is essential, therefore, that anyone who wishes to accompany cats in their teleportation must first understand the etiquette of it. The universal laws that allow for teleportation have always existed, of course; energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be harnessed and set free. It’s the etiquette and the mechanics of teleportation, exclusively developed and refined over millennia by cats alone, that have allowed them to harness this power and to readily utilize it.

  As for the most fundamental question—that is, why cats teleport in the first place—alas, there I have no definite answers. Though we cannot truly know their intentions, it does seem to me, after a lifetime of research, that cats travel with purpose, as they do everything with purpose.

  Regardless of the unknowability of their intentions, there is still much I can share with you about my observations in this remarkable field of study. And, as the world’s foremost—perhaps only—expert in feline teleportation, I salute your curiosity, your courage, and your much-warranted faith in the exceptional abilities of felines.

  Alder had just reached the end of the introduction when Oak shut the book. She flipped it over, as if she thought that perhaps some words might appear on the back, which, of course, did not happen.

  Then she turned back to the very first page, the one labeled Feline Teleportation, A Guide, with the author’s name.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Oak murmured. She flipped back and forth from the title page to the introduction, as if she were searching for a page that wasn’t there.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Alder asked.

  “There’s none of the usual stuff,” Oak said. “Like, I don’t know, the numbers and dates and information that’s at the beginning of books.”

  Alder must have looked as confused as he felt, because Oak got up and grabbed another book at random from the shelf.

  “Look,” she said, and she flipped open the book—a novel with a picture of the ocean on the front with the title The Waves of Memory—to the title page. Its reverse side did have a bunch of words and numbers: it had a copyright date; it had a short disclaimer that read “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in in any matter whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.” It had the name of the publisher, and a couple of long strings of numbers with the letters ISBN in front of them.

  Feline Teleportation had none of this. Just the title page, and then the book began.

  “That is strange,” Alder agreed. But it didn’t seem the strangest thing to him, not by far. “Let’s read more, okay?”

  Oak nodded and flipped back to the introduction, and then past it to the page labeled Chapter One: Teleportation: A History.

  There was a noise from the hallway—a door opening.

  “Oak?”

  Hearing Oak’s mother’s voice made Alder feel nervous. He’d forgiven Oak for what had happened to the tree, and for the other things, too, like shoving him, but he remembered the tone of his own mother’s voice when Oak’s mom had ordered the tree to its death, the way Alder’s mom had said, That woman.

  He felt, suddenly, panicky and overwhelmed. He didn’t know why this was the thing that disturbed him, after everything else he’d experienced in the past few days—all the strangeness, all the oddities—but suddenly, with the sound of Oak’s mother’s voice, it was too much, and Alder knew that he needed to go home.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

  “What do you mean—?” Oak began, but Alder had already wrapped one hand around Fern, and he stood, tucking her inside his cardigan. Shoving his feet into his shoes and throwing his backpack over his shoulder, he reached for the handle of Oak’s front door. This door was orange, not green like his, not plain wood like the third door—Mort’s door—but other than the color, this door could have been any one of those, and Alder had the strangest feeling, like anything could be on the other side.

  He stood still, his hand on the silver knob, almost afraid to turn it. Then he yanked it open to a perfectly normal view of his perfectly normal street, and there was his own house next door. His perfectly normal house.

  Chin tucked, kitten cradled, Alder hurried home.

  Chapter 20

  “Did your friend leave already?” Oak’s mom asked. She was holding the mug Oak had brought her.

  “He just rushed out,” Oak said. Through the front window, she watched the back of Alder’s dark, curly head as he hurried down her front path and then turned left up the sidewalk and disappeared from view.

  “I was just going to see if you guys felt like pizza.” Mom took in the leftover sandwiches and tea. “But it looks like you already ate.”

  “Just a snack,” Oak said. And then, “Mom, the weirdest thing happened.” Feline Teleportation was still open on her lap, along with Walnut. “Remember I was looking for a book? The one you gave away? Well, you’ll never believe it—the lady right next door, our new neighbor, she actually bought it at the library sale, and Alder brought it over to give to me! Isn’t that bizarre?”

  “The neighbor?” Oak’s mom said. “Which one?”

  “The one on the other side of the tree,” Oak answered. “The tree you cut down.”

  The thing about Mom’s super-short hair was that the
re was nothing to disguise her expression—no bangs, no forward-falling locks of hair, nothing. So when her eyebrows arched and her mouth opened in surprise, and then when, a flash later, she drew her whole face closed like a shuttered window, Oak saw everything.

  “You say that like I wanted to get rid of the tree,” Mom said. “Like I enjoyed it or something. I don’t just go around looking for trees to cut down, you know.”

  Oak didn’t know what to say.

  Mom’s voice went higher, louder. “We needed to build another bedroom if we were all going to live here. Sometimes, a tree has to go. Sometimes, one thing has to end to make room for something else. All of us have to make hard choices, Oak. Someday, you will understand.”

  The wonder and magic of the book drained away, replaced by Oak’s quick anger. “You’re always saying that,” she said, as loud as her mother, which woke up Walnut, who hopped down from her lap. Oak got up also, too mad, suddenly, to stay sitting. “You say that someday I’ll understand, but you don’t understand all kinds of things, so what makes you so sure I will? And you know what’s even harder than making hard choices? Dealing with hard choices someone else got to make.”

  Mom didn’t say anything, but her eyebrows were up in twin surprised arches. Her forehead crinkled all across. “Is this about the move?” she said at last.

  “Take your pick!” Oak said. “The move. The tree. The bookshelf.”

  “The bookshelf? What about the bookshelf?”

  Did her mom even remember? “You rearranged all the books,” Oak said.

  “Oh, that,” Mom said. “Honey, I didn’t think you’d mind. It was pretty the way you did it, but I couldn’t find anything.”

  “Well,” said Oak, “I did mind. I mind all of it.” Her throat felt thick, tight. “You could have asked me what I thought about moving.”

  “Oak, honey, sometimes grown-ups have to make decisions that aren’t popular with kids. Like moving. Or cutting down trees. Not everything can be a vote.”