Might as well run home while they sleep, she reasoned. Her entire body ached, and her eyes had been burning for so long that she had almost forgotten what they felt like on a normal day. Still, her clothes were damp and beginning to stiffen, she smelled like week-old seawater, and she hadn’t eaten much besides moon fruit and Meelie’s flat cakes since she had left for the other realm. She could keep herself awake a little while longer for a hot shower and a hamburger or two. Besides, she wanted to dig deeper into her research on Meelie, and she was determined to find out more about Aimee’s life before the other realm. She kissed Riley on the forehead, then began to leave. Not wanting to worry her mother any more than she already had, she left a note on the dry erase board for her: Hungry. Soggy. Be back soon. She drew a butterfly beneath the message. She tiptoed to the door, took one more look at her weary family, and left the room without a sound.
Chapter Thirty-One
Quinn patted her pockets for the house key, but they were empty. She would have to retrieve the spare key from the walkway behind the house. Her mother kept one underneath a large stepping stone in the backyard because Butterfly often slept or played there during the day, and she figured that few intruders would think to go around back to look for a key. She scanned the street, not wanting give anyone the impression that she was trying to break into the house. Seeing no one, Quinn trudged through the muddy strip of grass toward the back fence. She was almost to the gate when Butterfly began barking furiously and jumping into the fence.
“Quiet!” Quinn whispered as sternly as she could. “Do you want to get the cops called on me?”
She continued toward the gate, shushing Butterfly, but he refused to calm down. She peered through the gap between two fence posts and called Butterfly to her. He responded by lunging at her, his teeth bared. Quinn jumped back just before his body slammed against the posts. He was barking even louder now, his paws slapping the wood each time he launched himself forward. The entire panel shook. Quinn continued to shush Butterfly, but he was too worked up to hear her. Then Quinn remembered her last return from the other realm. Aimee had explained to her that visiting the other realm would erase certain memories from her family’s minds; she hadn’t considered that Butterfly had memories too. Had he forgotten who she was already? If so, entering the backyard would be dangerous.
Quinn leaned against the house, considering how she might get into the house without Butterfly attacking her or drawing more attention than he already had. She couldn’t risk pulling the screen off any window in the front; perhaps one of the side windows was unlocked. She made her way along the brick, stepping quietly so that Butterfly would not rush back into the house to meet her. Her mother’s bedroom was locked. Luckily, the window in Riley’s and her bathroom was unlocked. Since the opening was at least six feet off the ground, they weren’t as diligent about securing that window.
She pushed up the sleeves of her jacket, scraped the soles of her sneakers against the brick, then scooted back to give herself a little room. Counting down in her head, Quinn took three quick strides toward the window, pressed her foot against the brick and pushed up hard. She caught the ledge with her fingertips. Holding herself up with one hand, she ripped through the screen with her other and pulled hard on the frame. The brick was already tearing at her skin, and she could feel her arm beginning to tremble. She pressed the palm of her free hand flat against the glass, then pried the window up until she had enough space to grip the underside and push the window all the way open. As soon as she did so, her fingers gave out, causing her to tumble to the ground. Undeterred, she cleaned her shoes one more time, backed up to the neighbor’s wall, and ran hard toward the opening. This time, she raised her foot higher off the ground, leapt upward, and flung her right arm over the windowpane. Quinn tensed her muscles and pulled herself through the window.
Once inside, she eased her way to the bathroom floor. Butterfly would be inside in an instant if he heard someone walking around. She removed her shoes and socks, then tiptoed to the back door. She could hear Butterfly barking outside, right where she had left him. Preferring speed to stealth, she slammed the doggy door down and flipped the lock. Butterfly barreled across the yard, pawing at the hard plastic that now blocked him from entering the house.
“Sorry, bud. I love you, but I’ve got to get cleaned up and back to the hospital before Riley wakes up.”
Quinn unlocked the front door and retrieved the mangled screen from the side of the house to be safe. She took a longer shower than she intended, scrubbing her body three times to get the salt from the ocean off her skin and out of her hair. Refreshed, she gathered clothes for the next few days. When she found her backpack, she saw that someone had rummaged through her research. Riley had a habit of nosing around, which Quinn didn’t usually mind. Today, though, her sister’s curiosity had her on edge. Had she written anything about the other realm in her notes? She couldn’t be sure until she got back to the hospital and talked with Riley. She shoved her tablet into the bag, grabbed the duffel with her clothes, and slipped out of the house.
* * *
Back at the hospital, Quinn’s thoughts were clearer than they had been in days, allowing her to navigate the labyrinthine halls with ease. She walked quickly, weaving to avoid the nurses and doctors making their rounds. Within a few minutes, she was outside Riley’s room, watching her family through the window. What she saw touched her, but also hollowed her: Jane was sitting with her legs crossed at the end of Riley’s bed, tallying the points from her latest turn at Yahtzee.
She was shocked; she and her mother played the game every Friday night when Quinn was first learning to count, but the box had been moved to the top shelf of Jane’s closet, a place Quinn had once called the graveyard for games of probability. Her mother had not been amused, Quinn remembered, and sent her to her room for the rest of the weekend. Now that she was a bit older and more mature, Quinn understood that probabilities made Jane spiral. To her mother, probability was the enemy of hope, and Jane desperately needed hope.
Quinn watched as Riley scooped the dice into the cup, then made a wide circle with her hands as she shook the cup. Satisfied, she slammed the cup onto the bed, then lifted the rim just enough to peek under.
“Three fives!” Riley shouted, clapping wildly.
Jane smiled, penciling in Riley’s points. She mouthed something that Quinn couldn’t make out, but she assumed Riley had just won the game because they started to place the scorecards and dice into the dusty game box. After they had cleared everything from the bed, Jane lay down next to Riley and stroked her hair until Riley fell asleep. Jane closed her own eyes, resting her head above Riley’s on the pillow. They looked almost serene despite the harsh white light and crowd of monitors around them. Happy, Quinn thought. They looked happy. That should have relieved Quinn, but instead she wondered if they would be better off if she decided to stay in the other realm.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she muttered to herself.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Did you say something?”
Quinn turned to see a nurse behind her. She shook her head, then turned her attention back to the hospital room. The backpack dug into her shoulders, and the duffel bag seemed to get heavier every minute. She tried to move into the room, but her legs were stiff and aching, so she stood there, a window away from the family she had shielded, the mother and daughter who had finally learned to find strength within themselves. Quinn let the bag drop to the floor, then eased herself down and sat cross-legged outside the room. Everything she cherished was lying in that hospital bed, yet they didn’t even know she had been gone. Had she been so easy to forget? Then she thought of Meelie, and Aimee, and the strange children who had made the other realm their home, and she realized that she missed them. They had become a family of sorts to her as well. They knew her sadness. They knew her struggle. They knew her sister’s name. If something happened to Quinn, she genuinely believed that they would take care of Riley and her mother. Perhaps the other rea
lm wasn’t as lonely as Quinn had imagined. Someday, she too might even call the caves her home.
Chapter Thirty-Two
That evening, Jane asked Riley if she was okay with just Quinn staying that night. She wanted to shower and get a good night’s sleep before returning to work the following day. Riley seemed to have rebounded, and her numbers were holding steady, at least for the moment, and Jane hadn’t been in the office in nearly a week. Riley assured Jane that she would be fine and that Quinn would take care of anything she needed just as she always had. Before Jane left, though, Riley begged for a break from hospital food. Her mother made a quick run for burritos and chips, then left for home.
Riley was still getting her strength back and got tired easily, so Quinn turned on the television for her and retrieved one of the Amelia Earhart books from her backpack. She kept a spiral notebook and pen nearby to take notes, but she quickly became so immersed in reading about Earhart that she forgot the assignment altogether.
“What are you reading?” Riley asked awhile later, startling Quinn.
“Just a book for class,” she replied nonchalantly.
“What is the story about?”
“This isn’t a story. Well, I guess there’s a story, but not like you’re used to. I mean—okay, so this story is true, right? Remember that woman I was talking about at dinner one night, Amelia Earhart? She decided that she wanted to fly planes, only some people didn’t want her to.”
“Why?”
“She was too outspoken about the need for women pilots, which I guess was controversial at the time. I can’t figure out why so many people would resist the idea of female pilots, though, especially during a war. Even if the military didn’t want to send women into battle, which I think is a little ridiculous anyway, they could have used women to deliver supplies to camps in safe zones, or to help with mail service while men were overseas.”
“So what did she do?”
“That’s the coolest thing about her. She just did her own thing: flew planes and wrote a book and encouraged other women to learn how to fly, too. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Some people said that wasn’t special because she was just in the plane, not the one actually flying, so then she flew across the same ocean all by herself. People really started to like her after the war. Maybe she didn’t talk as much about women soldiers, or maybe people just had more to worry about when the country ran out of money. I don’t know. I’m still reading.”
Riley was quiet for a few minutes.
“What was your dad like?” she asked, the question growing until every corner of the room felt heavy and full.
“You mean our dad?” Quinn corrected.
“I don’t have a dad,” Riley shrugged.
“Of course you do.”
“Can you call someone dad if you’ve never met him?”
Quinn had expected her to ask about their father eventually. In fact, she was surprised that Riley hadn’t asked when she was young and all her friends were doing Father’s Day crafts at school, but Riley just made pictures of Quinn, her mother, and Butterfly. Really, that was the only version of family Riley knew.
“I don’t know how to answer that, boo.”
“I’m not sad or anything. I just—maybe I could miss him if I knew what he was like or how he smelled or when he went away.”
“You know, I can’t remember exactly when dad left. He left me this teleidoscope,” Quinn gestured to the object hanging at her neck, “on the day you were born. But I remember a trip not too long before then. Mom was really big and couldn’t hike very far into the mountains without getting dizzy. Dad was there. At least, I think he was.”
“Was he nice?”
“Oh, definitely. Dad was the biggest goof. He lived to laugh.”
“Then why did he leave?”
Quinn thought for a long time. “I—I can’t remember. I think he had to go somewhere for work, and he just—I guess he couldn’t find his way back home.”
“Do you think he left because of me?”
“No way, sis. Wherever he is, I imagine his saddest thought every single day is that he doesn’t get to know you.”
Quinn studied Riley’s face, which seemed to slump in the way her whole body did after running on the playground.
“Hey, do you want to help me find stuff about some other people I’m researching?” she asked, trying to get Riley’s mind off their father.
“Okay!”
Hopefully Riley could at least find information about who the children were in the other realm. They knew everything about her from talking to Meelie, yet Quinn knew almost nothing about them. The idea that she could miss people whose names she didn’t remember, or who lived decades or even hundreds of years ago, was difficult for Quinn to embrace and accept.
She pulled the computer from her backpack, plugged the cord into the bedside outlet, and then connected to the hospital’s wireless network. Next, she wrote down several phrases on a piece of paper: five children; disappeared; kids missing; unsolved; never found.
“So the first thing you’ll do,” she explained, “is type one or two of the phrases into the search bar.” Quinn pointed to the search bar, then typed: five children + disappeared.
“Why did you use a plus sign with words?”
“If you use the plus sign, you can find things that have both of the phrases you type. Sometimes, we find too many websites to read all of them. This is one way to filter them, or see only the ones that talk about what we’re looking for.”
Riley nodded, then furrowed her brow and began to scan the search results. Quinn smiled at the look of concentration on her face. Perhaps research was a little more than Riley was used to, but Quinn figured Riley would get a kick out of helping, and she would have to learn how to do Internet searches eventually. When she got to middle school, teachers would be assigning research projects in almost every class.
“When,” Quinn whispered to herself, letting the notion take shape in her mind.
She was used to saying “if” when she thought of Riley’s future, but that didn’t feel right anymore. She looked over at Riley, whose face was illuminated by the laptop. Her baby sister was growing up. Most people probably dread the day their kids learn how to use the Internet, but things are different when you don’t think your kid will live long enough to need an e-mail address. Families with dying children don’t live the way other families do. They are all part of a larger culture, one built on grief and desperation. How would her family adapt if Riley stayed healthy? Quinn didn’t have an answer; the question was intriguing, though. She decided that she would have to spend some time looking into how other families moved on once kids had beaten cancer or gotten a transplant. Not at the moment, though. At the moment, all she wanted was to know more about the people she had left behind in the other realm.
“You finding anything interesting?” she asked.
“Some.”
“Can you be more specific?” Quinn pressed.
“Oh, sorry. Um—I see a lot of stuff with the name Sodder. I can’t really understand most of the words, but I found fire and Sodder and children in a lot of the little paragraphs under the links. Is that what you were looking for?”
“Fire? Do you see anything about what caught on fire, or what happened to the five kids?”
“The family had ten kids, not five. Oh, no—their house burned down on Christmas. That’s so sad!”
“Wait, ten kids?”
Quinn put her book on the chair and walked around to look at the screen. She began mouthing the words to herself as she read.
“Read out loud,” implored Riley. “I want to know, too!”
“This says that the house caught on fire. Most of the older kids, and the baby, got out of the house, but three girls and two boys were stuck upstairs. No one could get through to the fire department. Someone had thrown the family’s ladder down a ditch away from the house, so the father couldn’t get to the kids who were trapped, and they coul
dn’t get down. Whoa—someone cut the phone line on purpose. After everything had burned, the fire department said the house had electrical problems, and none of the children could be found, except a lot of people saw the Christmas lights on—that doesn’t make any sense. How could a power surge cause the fire if the lights stayed on? Sounds like some people think the fire was started on purpose to get back at the dad or something. Oh, the fire wasn’t hot enough to burn up the kids. The mom and dad always believed that the missing kids were still alive because the firefighters never found any bones or anything. They just . . . disappeared.”
“That’s so sad. And on Christmas? Why would your teacher want you to learn about this?”
Quinn thought for a minute. “I’m trying to learn about people who went missing. My project is about Amelia Earhart. She disappeared trying to fly around the world. The Sodder children disappeared, too. They didn’t go missing in the same way, but I guess learning how different people disappeared and what happened after will help me understand Amelia Earhart more.”
“How can people just stop being there?”
Quinn took a deep breath. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. Though she was honest with Riley about death, she didn’t spend much time on the people who keep living after someone dies. She was afraid that Riley would have a harder time with her condition if she knew that her family would have to go on without her. And why should she carry that? Knowing that Jane and Quinn would be heartbroken wouldn’t change anything. They were going to mourn Riley no matter what. Unless, of course, this butterfly heart healed Riley for good.
The Kaleidoscope Sisters Page 16
