Other Worlds Than These

by John Joseph Adams

  Maggie loved it. Better, she worked at it, listened to everything her coach said, practiced at home with a dowel rod from Dave’s workshop, making little gliding steps across the kitchen floor, lining her feet up with the lines on the linoleum. I watched her during lessons, then sparring with her classmates, and, when my heart wasn’t in my throat imagining all the ways she could get hurt, felt a tingle of pride every time she outwitted her opponent, scooped her blade out of the way, swished it over and touched to score a point. When she took her mask off, her face glowed with smiling. The advertisements were right: she grew to be confident and poised, more than I ever was at her age, when I tended to creep along, slouching in oversized sweaters.

  At twelve, the riding lessons started, because she begged and kept her grades up. Dave printed off an article about Modern Pentathlon, a strange sport where athletes competed in running, swimming, pistol shooting, fencing, and riding. Supposedly, the event was modeled on nineteenth-century military training, replicating the skills a spy would need to cross enemy lines and deliver a message to his commander. Maggie read the article, her eyes growing rounder and rounder. She took up jogging in the mornings before school.

  My daughter showed no interest at all in conventional sports like volleyball or gymnastics. I’d been in marching band.

  When she was fifteen, Dave asked her, jokingly, as he gave our credit card number to the fencing supply company’s website—yet again—for new epee blades and shoes because she’d grown out of the old ones, “Swords and horses. Why couldn’t you have been a track star like your old man?”

  She didn’t look up from her horse magazine, didn’t smile, and answered seriously, “Because when Corlath whisks me away to Damar I have to be ready.”

  Dave stared at her blankly.

  “I think it’s from a book she read,” I explained. She kept a stack of paperbacks by her bed. Most of them had swords, or horses, or both on the covers.

  Her riding coach told Dave and me, she has a gift. She’s a natural. Even I could see it, and all I knew about horses was what I learned from Disney movies. The animals carried her around jumping courses, their ears flicked back and listening to her, though she never seemed to move while she sat on their backs, never seemed to tell them what to do. She had an uncanny way with the horses, and I thought, maybe it’s all those books about horses that gave her that sixth sense.

  Her coach wanted us to buy her a horse, a big thoroughbred who’d been competing in Europe and was experienced enough to teach Maggie about advanced riding and boost her confidence. She laid out a plan, including all the expenses, showing what it would take for Maggie to ride in the world championships, the Olympics. It cost too much, of course. The horse alone cost a third of what our house was worth, never mind what it cost to keep a horse. We didn’t want to break Maggie’s heart by telling her we couldn’t help her chase such a dream—you want to support your children. Strange, though, she seemed to understand. She never asked for more than we could give.

  She said, smiling wisely, “My time will come.”

  When she was seventeen, Maggie disappeared.

  The police found her car—she’d driven herself to a riding lesson—on the road by the lake where my family had a cabin. I couldn’t tell them why she might have gone there. They didn’t find any sign of Maggie.

  It made the news for weeks, because she was young and pretty, blond and smiling. We took out a second mortgage and offered a huge reward for information. We went on the news shows—how could we not, when the cameras camped outside our doorstep? The whole neighborhood put up yellow ribbons.

  It was all so exhausting. I let Dave do all the talking about how much we prayed for her safe return. Somber, he braced himself with his arm around my shoulder.

  I told the police what every mother tells the police—she isn’t the kind of girl to just run away. She’s not like that. She got straight As, she took out the trash.

  They just shook their heads. She’s seventeen, they said. She could have done anything. Are there any boys? Anyone she was seeing? No, I said. None. She’d never dated, which had been a vague cause of worry. Another difference between her and me that I didn’t understand. When I was fifteen I couldn’t wait to date boys, couldn’t wait to find my Prince Charming. When she was fifteen I told Dave, “The horse thing, she’ll grow out of it. They always grow out of it when they discover boys.” Except if I’d been paying attention, I’d have known that some girls didn’t. Her riding instructors, for example: devoted women who practically lived at the barn, because they hadn’t grown out of it.

  No, there weren’t any boys, except for Corlath, a character in a book with a sword and a horse on the cover.

  She couldn’t have run away, I told them. She was taken. Whisked away. I couldn’t say by whom.

  After two years, everyone assumes that she’s dead. We wait to hear word that her body has been found by a hiker in the woods. Decayed beyond recognition, they’ll need her dental records to confirm her identity.

  Dave wants to sell the house and move. I refuse, because what if she comes home? How will she know where to go? I keep her room clean and ready.

  I threw all my DVDs of Disney princess movies away. I wonder if it’s my fault that she’s gone. If I’d watched her closer, made her take gymnastics instead of fencing—I’d never understood her, and she knew it somehow, and she ran away.

  “She didn’t run away,” Dave says. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, both of us pretending to sleep but really staring at opposite walls and holding ourselves rigid, he says this. “She isn’t that kind of girl.”

  Except that she’s gone, and is it really easier to believe that someone had taken her, had done things to her? Or that she’s locked up helpless somewhere wondering why we don’t come looking for her?

  Wondering why there isn’t a prince to rescue her?

  No, she wouldn’t look for a prince. She’d always carried her own sword. I’m the one who’d looked for a prince.

  Every couple of months, Dave takes me to the cabin. It’s the family cabin that I share with four of my cousins—a house, really, with two stories, three bedrooms, a screened-in porch, a stone walkway leading to a tiny wooden dock jutting into the lake, where we tie up the canoes. Dave wants me to get away from the cameras, the news, the phone calls we still sometimes get from police about tips that didn’t pan out. Every time the phone rings my heart stops. Is it Maggie calling to ask us to come get her and bring her home? Or is it the police telling us that they’ve found her, or what’s left of her?

  When we came here as a family, Maggie would sit out on the dock at twilight, reading a book and watching the evening mist form over the water. She said she dreamed pictures in the haze, stories from the books she read.

  They found the car just a few miles away. She must be close, one way or the other.

  The cabin holds as many difficult memories as the house, but I think Dave needs the quiet, the solitude, and he needs to believe that it’s me who needs the quiet.

  Every time we visit, I sit on the dock, watching the mist, and wonder what she saw. Horses and swords, warriors riding out against dragons who breathed fire. Warriors with long, streaming hair, who didn’t have to disguise themselves as boys. Those are the stories she told herself—that’s what she saw in the mist. I’d sat out here when I was a girl, but if I saw pictures in the mist over the water, or heard voices calling, I don’t remember.

  She’d dreamed of competing in Modern Pentathlon in the Olympics someday. I’d applauded the goal, supported her all I could, as best as I knew how—you try to support your children, even when you don’t understand their dreams or the visions they see in the mist. All that was taken away from her. From me.

  Every time I sit on the dock in the evening, Dave comes after dark to help me to my feet and lead me back to the cabin. I’ve usually grown too stiff from sitting there and can’t bring myself to stand and walk away.

  How long can it go on? Our lives have stuck, wai
ting for Maggie to come home. I could stay out on this dock for the rest of my life. Become a statue sitting here. One day Dave won’t bother coming to get me. One day, he’ll just leave, sell the house like he wants, and start a new life somewhere.

  He has that luxury. Me, I’ll never have another little girl.

  Dave’s gone to town for groceries. He asked me to stay in the house until he got back, but I’ve come to sit on the dock for the afternoon. I’ll get sunburned, and when he gets back he’ll yell at me for it, but I won’t be offended. He yells for other reasons. From helplessness. We’ll hold each other after he yells at me.

  My skin flushes and tingles and burns in the sun, and I stay by the water, watching the sun splash flecks of gold on the tiny rippling waves. Shadows grow long, thin, and stretched, the sky turns an impossible royal blue, and the air begins to bite. This is when the mist starts to rise from the water, when the flecks of gold disappear and the water turns pewter, thick like molten metal.

  Some birds cry. Bats dip over the water snatching at insects, and fish splash to the surface, doing the same.

  And there is splashing, more steady than the fish, rhythmic and purposeful. Oars tucked gently into the water, not fish leaping carelessly.

  Both canoes are tied to the dock. No one visits us here. Or if they do, they drive.

  Someone is coming over the water, and I can’t be bothered to stand.

  Then it appears, sliding out of the mist. Not a canoe but something larger, like a rowboat but stretched. It’s wood, not plastic or aluminum—boards fitted together and sealed with pitch. The bow slopes up and ends in a spiral carving.

  There are four hunched figures in the boat, hidden in shadows. Not shadows—they’re wearing cloaks with hoods up. The largest of them sits in the middle and works the oars. The oars creak in the oarlocks, but the figure itself makes no sound. Another figure sits in the back, holding the long, smooth handle of the rudder. Two more sit in the front. One of them leans forward, searching. The other reaches out for her, like he’s afraid she might fall over the side.

  I’m not sure why I think that figure is a woman.

  I wait because I can’t not wait. Pictures in the mist, is this what Maggie saw? Had she always seen strangers, so that she didn’t think them strange and would follow them, get into their cars and let them take her away?

  The boat slides up to the end of the dock. A rope is thrown out, one of the men jumps onto the dock and ties the rope to the post. The woman gets out and runs three steps, stops, stares at me.

  Throws back her hood to show her yellow hair, and her face, my Maggie’s face, a little weathered maybe, and I wonder what has made her look tired.

  I just stare at her.

  “Mom?”

  The cloak, pushed over her shoulders now, reaches to her ankles. It might be wool, thick and homespun. She wears a thick leather vest over a long-sleeved brown shirt, belted over leather pants. Her tall boots look softer and more comfortable than her usual stiff black riding boots. There’s a sword hanging from her belt by leather straps. It’s hidden in a scabbard, and seems heavier and more threatening than anything she ever used in fencing class.

  She kneels in front of me. I’m hugging my knees to my chest. My muscles are frozen, but my face is wet.

  “Mom?” she says again, fearfully, her voice cracking.

  “You didn’t run away. I kept telling them you didn’t run away.”

  “I had to go, Mom. I had to.”

  “Maggie. They took you away from me. They took you away—” I stare at her, my heart bleeding and breaking. She is a ghost and I have gone mad at last.

  She puts her arms around me. I fall into her embrace, sobbing like a child, inconsolable. She is solid, my child, not a ghost.

  I look over her shoulder at the men I believe—I assume—took her away from me. Masters of some religious cult, or a gang (Were there any boys? the police asked, and like a fool I said no, when I didn’t know anything).

  The three of them stand near the boat, watching us uncomfortably. They’re dressed like Maggie, in leather and rough cloth, high boots, scuffed and worn, cloaks with hoods, studded belts and swords.

  The largest of them has coarse hair tied back with a piece of leather. He looks over the water, clutching the hilt of his sword. He’s standing guard; the posture is unmistakable. The oldest has short hair the color of fog and a trimmed beard. He watches the third man, who watches my daughter. This one’s face is set in hard lines, his lips frowning, an expression that makes him formidable, yet handsome. Unreachably handsome. I hate him for the way he watches my daughter with such intensity his eyes burn. He has short hair and no beard, and wears a polished red stone on a chain.

  This means something. This all means something, but I can’t guess what.

  Maggie must sense me staring back at him, because she pulls away and turns to look back and forth between us. “Mom, I have so much to tell you.”

  I clutch her sleeves, holding her arms as best I can, my knuckles white. The scenarios playing in my mind to explain what I see before me are muddled.

  It doesn’t help when Maggie says, “This is my husband. He’s the king.” King of what? The words don’t make sense.

  “They took you away,” is all I can find to say.

  “I had to go.” She pulls on my arms, helping me to stand. I feel like an old woman. None of my joints work. But a moment later I’m standing. Maggie is still talking. “They needed me. They still need me. I didn’t know what was happening at first. I came here, something drew me here. I watched the mist over the lake, like I used to do when I was little. This time, the mist spoke to me. Maybe it had always been speaking to me, but this time I really heard it. I was at that point—I didn’t want to go to college, couldn’t train for the pentathlon, and I no idea what to do with my life. So I stepped out. I stepped over the water—and there he was with the boat, waiting.”

  “She belongs with us,” the man, the one Maggie said is a king, and her husband, speaks. I’m surprised I understand him—I expect him to speak a guttural Scandinavian language. He sets his shoulders, fisting his hands, like he’s preparing to do battle.

  I realize that Maggie isn’t staying.

  “Who are you?” My voice is shrill.

  “Mom—” Maggie recognizes the tone.

  The gray-haired man steps forward. “We are warriors protecting you and your world from a darkness you cannot fathom.”

  It’s silly. Words from the blurb on a paperback.

  “We called one of you to join us in the battle. For a long time, we called. Almost, she came too late.” He glares like this is my fault. I glare like I don’t believe him.

  “Mom, I only have a few minutes. I have to say goodbye.”

  “Why? Why call her?”

  “Because you did not answer when I called you.” And this wasn’t me failing my duty to his world. I had betrayed him personally. That is what his look says to me. He might have been the prince in his day.

  Had there been a time, when I was a girl staying with my family and cousins at the cabin, standing on this dock, when I heard voices in the mist, and ran away because I was afraid?

  “Where’s Dad,” Maggie asks. “Is he here?”

  I shake my head. I haven’t heard the car return, crunching along the gravel drive. “He’s getting groceries.”

  She presses her lips in a line. “Will you tell him I was here? Will you tell him I love him? I love you both. I’m sorry I can’t stay.”

  “Maggie.” The word is a sob, filled with desperation.

  It’s no comfort that she’s crying too. “There’s still fighting. I have to go.” The thought of her using that sword—a real sword with a sharp edge that draws blood, not a dull flexible rod with a button on the tip that registers hits with a green or red light—makes me ill. The thought of her coming up against such a weapon makes me ill.

  The large man says, “We should go. The shadows grow close.”

  He’s right.
The mist has become a wall around us.

  The king nods. “Meg?”

  It’s not her name, but she nods. When had she become Meg? If she wanted us to call her Meg why didn’t she say anything? She studies me, like she expects to never see me again.

  They will have children, my grandchildren, and I will never see them.

  “I want you to be proud of me, Mom. I’m happy, with him. I need you to be happy for me.”

  You try to be supportive. All I want to do is scream. But I nod.

  She kisses my cheek, then lets go of me. The king holds out his hand to her, and she takes it. A look of such trust passes between them, I can’t understand it because I come from a world without princes. They have saved each other’s lives. He guides her back to the boat.

  “Maggie!” I cry, stumbling forward, falling to my knees. “I love you! Don’t go, please—”

  The boat, all its passengers aboard, fades back to the mist, without even a splash.

  You did not answer when I called you.

  Just after twilight, under a dark blue sky, Dave finds me lying on the dock, as if I’d curled up to sleep. He picks me up, carries me to the house, puts me to bed, and I don’t even notice. I pretend I’m dreaming. I wake up sometime—lamps light the room, the windows are dark—to smell hot tea and a crackling fire. Dave sits by the bed, watching me with something like desperation. He is no king or wizard from the mist. His brown hair is thin, the hairline receding. He wears a plaid flannel shirt untucked over gray sweatpants, not leather armor.

  “What were you doing out there?” he says.

  I know the words are crazy but I have to say them because she asked me to. “I saw Maggie. She was here. She said to tell you she loves you. She loves us. She had to go.” Rolling to my side, I stretch my arm under the pillow and hug it to my face. She came back, I think, strangely happy. She didn’t have to come back to tell me what happened to her, but she did. “She isn’t coming back.”

  We stare at each other, because after all this time I’ve made it real. Saying the words has locked hope away, sealed its coffin. She isn’t coming back.