“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH,” she screamed! Debbie pulled her invisible arm back with all the strength of Superwoman. She fell backward onto her butt, rolled completely onto her backside and tumbled head-over-heels for twenty feet to the colonnade. She looked exactly like a half flat volleyball that had been given a solid kick into the net. She crashed to a stop on her behind, her spine askew against the dead tree. Debbie stared with basketball-sized eyes, first at her right hand, then her left, then her right, and back again. She patted her right arm with her left and touched every inch from wrist to shoulder. Finally, she whipped her once-missing arm around in the air to make sure it was actually connected, and really hers. Both arms were present and completely intact; however, Debbie’s sense of reality was, suddenly, not.
“It can’t be,” Debbie spit out moss and dirt in some semblance of a controlled panic. “Mom was telling the truth!” Her voice rustled more than the dead maple leaves at her feet. “It can’t be. My arm was there. Then it wasn’t. Now it’s back.” She spat again, another chunk of dirt, and she brushed the bouncing bugs from her arm without giving them a second thought. “Mom can talk about her orb and her prophecy and her tiny world and her cousin all she wants,” Debbie said, “but I am NOT going through that gate! I don’t care how true that fairytale is!”
She lifted and reassembled herself from the semi-twisted heap that she was, and she brushed off the smooshed mushroom, the dirt, and the broken sticks. Her head was jumbled with too many unknowns to count, and her heart was filled with the only emotion that did count. Debbie stumbled through the trail and toward the house. For the length of the trip, she mumbled incomprehensible words and kicked ferns and stumps, more than once stopping to massage injured toes. It felt like hours, but only twenty minutes had passed since Debbie’s arm disappeared; then, Debbie saw her mom sitting on GG’s deck.
Hannah smiled as Debbie approached, at first excited to see her daughter returning safely. Then she saw, and she understood. Hannah’s eyes clouded with tears. “Y-You didn’t go,” she sobbed. “You’re not going to bring him back.”
“I chose,” Debbie answered. With her head held high and her eyes piercing the space directly ahead, Debbie trotted straight into the house. “You can stay on the deck, mom, and you can cry as much as you want for anybody and anything, but I am not going through your precious portal.”
Hannah’s chest heaved repeatedly, and it ached from deep inside. Hannah wiped her eyes and forced herself to take control. She thought of the orb and the words that it had etched into her soul. She was certain that she was correct, certain of the orb’s meaning, and certain she had done what needed to be done.
“Greetings to the queen mother. There are many secrets yet to be learned. This is the secret of the second promise. Listen carefully. Act accordingly. Remember. The second alone will give the first. The first given will be most versed. That one alone will know the way to bring the lost one home to stay.”
*****
2. The Bedroom Closet
Hannah felt two doors crash closed behind her, one mere seconds after the other: first, the door to the house; second, the door to the room where Debbie would be hiding. Hannah knew that particular room all too well. It was the bedroom Debbie was using during this visit. It was also the bedroom that Grandma shared with Grandpa when he was alive. Grandma hadn't touched that room since August, twenty-two years ago; in fact, she had not been in it since the day that Hannah and her family drove back to Spokane after Grandpa disappeared. At that time, Hannah’s dad stayed behind to help Grandma through the trauma of Grandpa’s disappearance. Hannah’s dad, in fact, helped Grandma move out of that bedroom. That was the day she lost all hope. Grandma had not entered her old bedroom since that day. She had not cleaned it, nor had she slept in it. She had not even put clean sheets or blankets on the bed. Those who chose to sleep in Grandpa’s bedroom were saddled with such jobs. Grandma, Debbie’s GG, wanted nothing more to do with that room; it held far too many memories. GG wanted only two things to fill the rest of her life: to forget the day that Grandpa disappeared, and to remember all the days prior. Since GG no longer used her old bedroom, she slept in what was once the office. That’s where she was now. Grandpa disappeared in his woods nearly twenty-two years ago. GG suffered through every one of those years, and now she decided to spend her remaining years asleep, dreaming of the past and hiding from the present.
Debbie wedged her body against her bedroom door, securing it against anyone who might try to enter. Minutes passed. No one tried. She sulked across the room and swung the armoire doors open revealing Grandpa’s ancient television set. She pointed the remote at the television to turn the set on. It took quite some time, so much that Debbie wondered if the thing actually worked, but the set’s fuzzy glow finally turned into a picture. The news was on, but Debbie had no interest in it. She didn’t even listen to it. In fact, she muted the sound altogether. Debbie watched a video of two spots moving slowly across the sun. She watched the words that scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Mercury and Venus won’t transect the sun again for another 67,000 years. She turned the set off without understanding why she had turned it on.
Perhaps it was the sudden sense of feeling alone, or maybe it was the drapery-muted light of Great Grandpa’s bedroom that prompted Debbie to consider the consequences of her mini-tantrum. She certainly disappointed her mother. She shattered the sobering peace and quiet that GG expected. Well, it’s certainly too late for a redo; she thought. What was done was done. I’ll apologize later, she reflected, when I’m finished. She stood for a moment to absorb the nearly perfect silence that surrounded her. There wasn’t a human sound to be heard. A jay thumped on the skylight above her, pecking ants, Debbie presumed. A slight breeze brought song to the wind chimes that hung just outside the bedroom window. Other than the tapping and tinkling, Debbie believed she could hear the dust settle. Suddenly, the girl shivered. Great Grandpa’s presence is everywhere in this room. It’s like I can feel him. The thought came from nowhere. Every single thing in this room is of him and by him. Great Grandpa even designed and built the bed where he and GG once cuddled. Debbie permitted herself to touch the wood and feel its soft warmth and smooth texture. Even though she had slept in this bed many times, even snuggled in it with her parents when she was younger, she had never really looked at it. It was a simple and beautiful creation. Constructed of pure alder, it was perfect in every way, right down to its natural glow. Debbie stood quietly with her hands on the footboard—until she jerked; a small yelp escaped when she felt the pull of Great Grandpa’s hands guiding the sandpaper along the wood’s grain. Shock caused her legs to crumble beneath her. She settled on the floor and in front of the cedar chest that resided at the foot of the bed. Great Grandpa made that, too. She slowly stroked her hands across the varnished cedar; she felt its smooth softness through gentle finger tips, and she felt her heart settle into a more comfortable speed. It was almost as if Great Grandpa were consoling her, comforting her. She cracked open the lid and inhaled the waft of cedar-scented dust that escaped.
The chest was crammed with what Debbie thought of as simply “stuff.” Hannah and Debbie spoke of this many times: GG always had a tendency to store lots of things: lots of memories in boxes, in totes, in chests. Now, those memories remain stored and mostly unseen. They remain out of sight and out of mind, but they are never lost. This room was like that: memories hidden behind a closed door. This chest was exactly like that. It contained dozens of memories that GG didn’t want to remember, but also, didn’t want to lose. All these memories remained exactly as she had left them: letters that Great Grandpa had written, trinkets he had made, baseballs, cards and notes from their boys, tiny boxes of who-knows-what. Debbie chose one box that especially caught her eyes. It was leather bound and very old in appearance, tiny—about three inches square—and she shook it. She wondered at its softened rattle, but she replaced the box exactly inside its dusty borders without opening it. Debbie
closed the chest lid. At the sound of its locking ‘click,’ she sat on the floor absorbing the sum total of the room and all that was in it. “Holy Crud!” She whispered. “He even made the closet doors.”
Debbie stood and moved toward those doors as if she were being drawn to them. She touched each one, expecting to feel his hands as she had earlier. Strangely, what impressed Debbie most about these doors wasn’t the workmanship. It was, instead, the papers that Great Grandpa stapled to them many years earlier; so long ago, in fact, that everything on the door was yellowing with age, growing fragile and brittle, even beginning to fade. There were photos of Stonehenge, maps with lines and circles and pushpins, questions that only Great Grandpa knew the answers to—and he was gone.
Debbie rolled open one door and entered the closet. At first, she saw this as the perfect hiding place, and yes, it was another wall between herself and her mother. She sat on the closet floor, pulled both doors closed, and covered herself with darkness. She sat with her back against the wall, knees tucked to her chest, face and shoulders covered by old, hanging clothes and the dust that shook off them. Her eyes peered between pant legs to the blank backside of one closet door. Now, she was ready. Debbie allowed herself to be weak and permitted herself to cry. It was, however, a short cry interrupted by an unexpected vision.
She thought it was an optical illusion; perhaps it was caused by eyes growing accustomed to the feeble light that snaked through cracks between doors and walls. Maybe it was a trick of the light-starved shadows, or possibly it was a blur seen through tearful eyes. She tried shaking her head; she blinked to pry loose the wetness from her eyes, but the illusion remained. There was definitely a crack in the wall adjacent to the closet door, and it appeared to be intentionally hidden by two sets of drawers on wheels. She rubbed her eyes again; the crack still lingered; it was not going away; it was definitely real. Debbie looked closer; she strained to focus. It wasn’t really a crack, she saw. It was more of a cut. She didn’t know how else to describe a perfectly fitting straight line that was nearly invisible and hidden inside the almost-straight grain of the closet’s wood paneling. Whatever it was, the cut was intentional, not natural, and definitely man-made. Debbie crawled from her hiding place behind the pants. She rolled one closet door past the other, and she relocated the two sets of drawers into the bedroom. It was clear, now, unhidden and in better light. It was a hidden panel, a secret vault that had been built into the wall. Debbie tried smacking it with her hands. Oooh! Way too loud, Debbie thought, and it didn’t do any good, anyway. Debbie stopped breathing and listened for any sounds of her mother coming down the hall. Nothing. She went back to work and tried prying at the crack with her fingernails. She even jammed one of Great Grandpa’s belt buckles into the crack to use as a lever. It broke. Nothing worked. The door was locked; it was solid, and the lock appeared to be very special. “Darn you Great Grandpa!” Debbie whispered. “Mom always told me how good you were at making everything. You just had to be perfect!”
Debbie stared hard at the lock. It was similar to a safe dial, but different, more like two concentric dials from Grandma’s antique telephone. There were two wheels, each as big around as a soup bowl, one directly on top of the other. She didn’t know what the upper wheel was made of. It was a glossy black, and smooth as oiled steel, but it felt more like hard plastic; it was cool to the touch, but not cold like metal might be. Debbie rotated the wheel around its center point. It moved freely, but rotating the wheel accomplished nothing. There were holes in this wheel, each about the size of a nickel, each positioned in a way similar to the hour symbols on a clock. Debbie counted them. There were fourteen.
Directly beneath this steelish, plasticish wheel with the holes was another wheel of polished stone. It was the purest of whites, glossy, hard, and definitely cold. This stone wheel was exactly the identical size as the black one, and it rotated on precisely the same center. Etched into the stone wheel were ten depressions that were perfectly smooth and flawlessly formed. Each depression took the shape of a letter, and each letter was perfect: not block letters, but script; not chunky, but clean and flowing and smooth. Debbie visually measured the depth of each depression, and therefore, the size of each letter. She saw that each was approximately a quarter of an inch deep. She also noticed that each of the letters was placed as the holes were placed; one could position a hole in the upper wheel directly above a depression in the lower wheel. The letters and the holes were so smooth and so perfectly formed that Debbie believed they must have been engraved by an artist elf who wielded a magical blade.
Debbie took inventory of the lettered depressions on the wheel. Starting at the twelve o’clock position, and going clockwise, were the letters. L, E, C, I, V, F, O, H, I, and C. Between the L and E, the I and V, the O and H, and finally, the C and L, were empty holes. These were perfectly round, and they, also, had been etched deeply into the stone, looking much like someone had sliced a hollowed marble in half. Debbie rotated the two wheels so that each letter and each hole in the lower wheel was placed precisely beneath a hole in the upper wheel. The two wheels matched perfectly.
“Debbie,” Hannah called. The name came softly, muffled through closet walls and dusty clothes. “Debbie!” Her mom’s voice was closer now, and decidedly sharper. Debbie knew that her mother could find her within minutes if she wanted. She flicked both wheels for a final spin, first the upper wheel with the holes, and then the lower wheel with the recessed letters. Debbie didn’t know exactly what to expect. Perhaps she was hoping for luck, hoping that the door would spring open, but she got nothing.
“Coming, mom,” Debbie called into the darkness. “Be out in a minute.” She stood and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of the single button-down shirt that her Great Grandpa owned. She quickly replaced the moveable drawers that first hid the secret panel; she was certain to place the wheels exactly in their carpet indentations. Finally, probably thirty seconds later, Debbie opened the bedroom door to face her mother.
*****
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Grandpa's Portal Page 18
