by Abby Smith
Vala walked over to the couches and folded his arms. “Yes, well, in terms of problems of the universe I have to deal with, Allie’s crises are pretty easy for me.” He winked at me, his voice full of humor.
Pettikin gazed up at me with wide, worried eyes. “Do we get another chance, Allie?”
“We do, Pettikin.” I hesitated. “Tomorrow?” I asked Vala nervously.
He nodded, his eyes soft. “Tomorrow. You need some sleep tonight.”
The front door opened, and my dad came in wearing an old suede barn jacket and wool cap. He had a book and several DVDs tucked under his arm.
“Ah, you’re back! Everything OK then?” He unzipped his jacket.
Mrs. Widgit closed her book. “Everything,” she announced, “is just fine. And Theo and I will be leaving now.”
They pushed themselves up from the couch and made their way past my dad into the hallway. Mrs. Widget’s tote bag was on the bench by the door. She placed her book in it, then slung the bag across her shoulders. Professor Theopolous opened the door for her.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, girls! Have a pleasant evening!”
We were all quiet for a few moments. Vala watched out the window as Bob emerged from the alpacas’ barn and joined the Professor and Mrs. Widgit as they walked off. I wondered where they all spent the night. Sunshine poked her head out of the barn, staring after Bob.
“I brought you some movies,” Dad said finally. “And your Mother is going to call Coccia House right at five o’clock to order a couple of pizzas. I’ll go pick them up.”
“Seriously, if you don’t call right at five you’ll have to wait two hours for a pizza on a Saturday night,” Andie said.
“So I’ll be back tomorrow then,” Vala said to me. Then to my father, “Make sure she eats something tonight.”
“I will.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but he was already gone.
Andie got up from the floor, took the DVDs from my dad, and flipped through them.
She grinned. “Bugs Bunny cartoons. Four DVDs worth.”
I laughed. “That sounds like just about what I can handle tonight.”
Andie walked to the small den behind the living room where the TV and DVD player were.
“C’mon, Pettikin. I’ll show you one of our finer Earth creations.”
Pettikin followed her.
“Here, I brought this for you.” My dad handed me the book he was carrying, a light blue paperback with purple letters: The Poems of Theodore Roethke. The cover was creased and stained, the pages yellowed and curled up at the edges.
“Did you drop it in the toilet or something?” I joked as I flipped through it. A faded black bookmark with a red dragon marked the page with “The Waking”—the poem Aunt May left me at her funeral. I scanned it quickly.
I learn by going where I have to go.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He patted me on the back. Then he zipped up his jacket, stuffed his hands in the pockets, and prepared to leave. When he reached the door, he hesitated.
“You never asked me about the bet I lost with Aunt May.”
“I thought you said you didn’t actually lose the bet.”
He looked a little sad.
“Years and years ago, before you were even born, Aunt May told me that she would not be the last Gatekeeper on Earth, that in my lifetime there would be another. I guess I was young enough that I didn’t even want to consider that possibility. In answer to my obstinacy, she bet me that not only would there be another Gatekeeper in my lifetime, but that I would love that Gatekeeper even more than I loved her.”
I felt my throat tighten. He raised one corner of his mouth in a half smile. “I lost.”
I focused on the tattered book cover in my hands, not sure what to say.
Dad sighed. “Yep, I lost, and the wager, naturally, was good old-fashioned public humiliation. Gotta love Aunt May.” He reached for the door. “I’ll be back in a bit with the pizzas,” he said and left.
I stared at the book for a few seconds more, set it down on the coffee table, and went to join Andie and Pettikin in the den. They were sitting about a foot away from the TV, Andie cross legged and leaning back on her hands, Pettikin in his V-stance. I grabbed a pillow from the old couch that was pressed up against the back wall of the room and joined them, lying face first with my elbows on the cushion and face propped in my hands like a little kid.
It was a wonderful few hours of normalcy. Dad returned a little later with Coccia House pizza, salad, and a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream, then built us a fire in the fireplace before leaving for the night. We ate pizza and ice cream (Pettikin just ate ice cream) and watched Bugs Bunny cartoons until we wanted to strangle something every time we heard the theme music for a new episode. We turned the TV off and made our sleeping nest by the fire.
It wasn’t very late, not even ten o’clock, but by the time I crawled into my corner of the nest, I felt like I was running on fumes. Images of Bugs, Daffy and Wile E. Coyote swirled in my mind, then flickered and became disfigured, morphed into bat creatures swirling in a void. I willed the images away, tried to replace them with happier images of Pettikin, Andie, and the alpacas, but no matter what I did, the creatures reappeared, whirling and buzzing until they were a funnel cloud in my mind. It was too hard to fight them, and the last thing I remember before I passed out was an overwhelming feeling of despair.
I opened my eyes to complete darkness. The air was dank and cold like I had descended into the creepy basement of human consciousness. I was suspended in mid-air, with nothing to refer to and nowhere to go. I wrapped myself into a ball, legs tucked to chest, arms around legs, trying to feel safe. I didn’t know what to do. Then I heard faint music. Melancholy notes, struck one by one on the keys of some unseen piano, echoing through the void, each note louder than the first, until the melody surrounded me. A light appeared in the distance, so I unwrapped myself and willed myself to move toward it. I saw a figure standing there, and as I drew closer, I realized that it was Vala, still wearing his jeans and hoodie from our afternoon walk, his expression somber. He opened his arms, and I moved toward him. He wrapped his arms around me and pressed me to his chest. Relief washed over me.
That’s the last thing I remembered until morning.
20
I awoke in a warm tangle of blankets, radiators hissing softly, a beam of sunshine on my face. The despair I felt the night before was gone, but gone the way the pain of a toothache is gone after you get a shot of Novocain. Your tooth is numb, but you know the pain is still there, below the surface, waiting to return when the shot wears off. I rubbed my eyes and rolled onto my side, hoping to drift back to sleep.
A loud pounding on the front door caused all three of us to gasp and sit up. Socrates trampled over us, galloping toward the door, barking wildly. Andie and I gaped at each other with wide eyes and extreme bed hair. Pettikin shrieked and dove under a pile of blankets, which at least muffled the noise.
I jumped up and almost immediately slipped on the mess of blankets on the floor. I caught myself with my right leg out and hands on the ground in an awkward lunge, then pushed myself up again and ran for the door.
“All right, all right, we’re coming!”
I yanked the door open and was instantly struck on my forehead by Mrs. Widgit who was talking to Professor Theopolous.
“Ow!” I rubbed my head.
“Oh, sorry dear! I thought you were the door.” Mrs. Widgit picked up her totebag and a basket that was sitting next to her on the porch and breezed into the house. “Rise and shine, everyone!”
“We are risen,” Andie grumped as she padded out into the hallway, yawning and rubbing her arms. Pettikin’s shrieking had died down, hopefully because he was no longer scared and not because he had suffocated under the blankets. Socrates twirled, snorted, and slobbered on everyone, reminding me of the Tasmanian devil from the cartoons the night before. He finally dashed out the front door, which I shut behind him
.
Mrs. Widget’s blue and purple patchwork dress, embroidered with small pink flowers, could easily have been converted from a quilt. She wore pair of thick, gray wool socks with her Birkenstocks. Professor Theopolous was in the same outfit he had been wearing the past two days, as if he had been propped up in a corner all night instead of sleeping.
“Where’s Bob?” I asked.
“He’s with the alpacas, dear,” Mrs. Widgit called over her shoulder as she made her way into the kitchen. She set her basket down on the counter and began unpacking eggs, peppers, milk, and cheese.
“I’m under strict orders to feed you a good breakfast,” she announced, rummaging through the kitchen cabinets for a frying pan.
“We have to start getting ready already?”
She freed a frying pan from underneath a stack of pots and lids and placed it on the stove.
“I should say so—it’s almost eight o’clock.”
She found a cutting board and long knife and started rinsing a bright red pepper in the sink.
“That’s the middle of the night in Teenage Weekend Standard Time,” Andie opined.
Professor Theopolous turned on Aunt May’s stereo in the living room and the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony was crept into the kitchen. The portentous melody made me feel uneasy, and I could feel my emotional Novocain starting to wear off.
“Is that really appropriate, do you think?” I asked him, as he emerged from the living room and placed an armful of graph paper and books down on the kitchen table. I gestured to the air as if he could see the musical notes floating there.
“Oh, it’s just what was on the radio.” He took a seat and smoothed out a sheet of paper in front of him.
I wanted to tell him that the original set of maps he gave us hadn’t been all that useful, but decided against it. Let him be all old-school about it if he wanted.
Mrs. Widgit was fighting her breakfast war on several fronts now, brewing, toasting, and frying as the music crescendoed. I retreated to the living room with Andie to clean up the bed sheets and get dressed. We found Pettikin wrapped like a mummy in a blanket and unraveled him, me holding him steady while Andie pulled the blanket.
I took a quick shower, then pulled on the same jeans I had worn the day before and a clean t-shirt. Instead of drying my hair, I pulled it, still wet, into two tight braids so it wouldn’t be in my way all day.
I tried to fight the growing apprehension I was feeling, but by the time Andie and I sat down at the kitchen counter for breakfast, my stomach was twisting itself into knots. I ate about half of my eggs and then pushed my plate away.
Mrs. Widgit frowned.
“I ate most of it. I’m not going to starve, Mrs. Widgit.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line but didn’t say anything as she cleared my plate away.
Andie glanced at me in mid-chew, then looked down at her plate.
Pettikin sat next to me on the counter finishing a waffle. The cotton puff of his Santa hat flopped down next to his cheeks, which were still rosy from sleep, or possibly the exertion of screaming. Three drops of maple syrup stuck to his beard. I felt my chest tighten and my eyes well up with tears.
I jumped up before anyone could see and walked toward the front hallway, blinking furiously.
“Oh, Allie,” Mrs. Widgit said lightly. “Since you’re up, I wonder if you might do me a favor.”
I took a deep breath and turned around.
She was pouring coffee into a small red thermos. “Would you be a dear and take this out to the barn for Bob? I don’t think he has eaten yet, and I’m worried it might be a little chilly down there.”
She winked at me as she handed me the thermos, then started wiping off the counters.
The thermos felt warm in between my hands. “Sure, I’ll do that.”
“Andie, do you want to help me make some cookies?”
Andie had been watching me and assessed my mood in about a second.
“Sure, Mrs. Widgit, I’ll help.”
She got up and carried her plate to the sink. Mrs. Widgit rinsed and wrung out her dish rag, hung it over the kitchen faucet, then dried her hands on her apron. She fished through a large pocket in her dress and pulled out the purple clamshell device. It was humming quietly.
“Not time yet,” she murmured, returning the device to her pocket. She poured herself another cup of coffee and began unpacking baking ingredients from her basket.
Pettikin hopped down from the counter, scurried across the floor, and up to my shoulder. I felt my anxiety lessen and wondered if that was because I liked his company or if it was some strange gnome magic at work. I found my hoodie draped over a couch in the living room and shrugged into it, Pettikin placing his hands on my head and stepping over each sleeve as I tugged.
I opened the front door to a bright blue sky, red and gold leaves dappled with sunshine and frost sparkling on the grass like tiny, terrestrial stars. I hopped down from the front step, tucked the thermos under my arm, and zipped up my hoodie, breathing in the smell of rotting apples, fallen leaves, and woodsmoke from the main house. When I exhaled I could see my breath, but the sun cut through the chill of the air, warming my arms under the fabric of my sweatshirt.
I walked across the western yard of the cottage, toward two old apple trees whose branches form a fragrant canopy over the path to the barn every fall. Johnny Appleseed supposedly planted the trees in the early eighteen hundreds. I kicked a couple of small, green apples that had fallen into the path out of my way. Aunt May used to gather them every fall and make pies. I wondered if she had ever taken any of those pies to Pettikin in his world.
“Pettikin, sometimes I can’t believe we’ve only known each other for two days. After everything we’ve been through, it feels like we’ve known each other forever.”
“But we have known each other forever.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
He was quiet for a few moments. “Time must be really weird here on your planet. I don’t really understand it,” he said finally.
“How could time be any different here than it is anywhere else? Isn’t it one of those universal constants?”
“Did you think time was the same in the dimensions as it is here?”
We reached the fence, and I lifted the metal loop latch that secured the gate to the fence post next to it. I thought about the disconnect I felt the day before when we returned—that only a few minutes had passed when I thought we had spent hours or days in the other dimensions. But there had been no markers in the dimensions for the passage of time, no sunrises or sunsets, no sleeping, nothing for me to know how long we had actually been there.
“No,” I said slowly, refastening the gate behind us. “It was weird. It was like there was no time while we were there, but when we got back here I felt like not enough time had passed. But even if it we did spend more than a day together, how can you say that we’ve known each other forever?”
Something about the tone of Pettikin’s voice made me think that if I could see his expression it would be as incredulous as it was when he learned that I couldn’t talk to alpacas. “On Arcorn we don’t differentiate between now and any other time. So we know that anyone who is our friend now has always been our friend, and always will be our friend.”
I didn’t know what to say to that and felt tears welling up in my eyes again. Apparently I was going to be an emotional mess until this whole ordeal was over.
We walked across a rickety, makeshift bridge over a narrow drainage ditch that cuts across the pasture in front of the barn. The barn itself was as old as our house, a dark red, two-story structure, with wide, weathered boards and a steeply pitched gray metal roof. Two sets of double stable doors on either side of the main level were separated by a narrow door that led to a center tack room. Above them was a hay loft door with black hinges and a bright white X in its center.
The top half of the stable door on the right was open. I eased the lower door open
just enough so I could squeeze myself through sideways without letting any alpacas out. Inside it was dark and cool and smelled like hay and grain and insect repellant. The alpacas were munching hay from a row of hay racks on the left hand wall. They startled when we entered, then hummed hellos as they came over to greet us. I buried my fingers in the soft hair on Suzy’s neck, while Taos pressed a velvety nose to my cheek and exhaled in my ear.
Pettikin transferred himself from my shoulders to Sunshine’s. The door to the tack room was just beyond the hay racks. I paused with my hand on the rusty latch. I thought I heard low voices and wondered if Bob was listening to the radio. I pushed the door open.
A single, dim bulb cast an orange glow on knotted, wooden beams and ropes of ancient cobwebs that were so pervasive, they seemed part of the architecture. The room was long but narrow. About halfway down on the left, beside the built-in wooden ladder to the hay loft, two bales of hay were stacked neatly against the wall. A third bale, with its twine cut, had fallen into flakes on the floor. A shovel, rake, and pitchfork hung on large hooks on the opposite wall, alongside two brooms and some empty buckets.
Bob was standing just past the hay loft ladder on the right, one of the alpacas’ costumes draped over an old saw horse next to him. He was mending it with a needle and thread.
“Hey, Bob, I brought you some coffee—” I said and then gasped.
Leaning against the far wall, his arms folded across his chest, was Vala. He was wearing jeans, black boots, and a gray V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath.
“There she is,” he said, his lips twisting into a bemused smile.
“Oh hey, Allie,” Bob said shyly, “we were just talking about you.” He set his sewing down and stepped forward to take the thermos from my frozen, outstretched hand.
“Oh, really?” My voice was a little too loud. I folded then unfolded my arms, took a few steps to the side, and tried to lean casually against the wall to my right. Instead, I accidentally knocked over one of the brooms, which caught the lip of an empty bucket, flipping it on its side as it clattered to the ground.
