CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
As he carries Her he cannot help but think about how small She is. He did not know he had grown so great. Or perhaps, underneath it all, She had been this small all along.
The wildling carries his Mother down a long, dark tunnel. It stretches on and on, dipping through planes of reality, over and under and around Wink.
Finally it ends in a small stone chamber. In the center of the floor is a pile of rabbit skulls. The wildling kicks these away, clearing a space, and gently, gently lays his Mother down in its center.
He has Her now. They are reunited. At last.
He has dreamed of this moment. During his long, dark days chasing his family, and all throughout his long imprisonment, this is what he dreamed of, what he hoped for, what he needed.
He hates Her and loves Her. He wanted Her to love him, and hated Her because he knew She never would. But now he has Her.
He sits down across Her. She is terrible and beautiful, all at once. Even in death.
And he waits. For death can only last so long. Things like Mother can never truly die.
And when She reawakes… She will be here. She will be trapped here, with him, with nothing to see but these stone walls, and no one to speak to but Her son. Her beautiful son.
And he will make Her love him. Forever and ever and ever. And ever and ever and ever.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Mona opens her eyes to a scene of total devastation.
The giant, strangely, is gone, yet she can see where it fell, leaving a huge indentation like a drained lake. It looks like it broke a gas main when it fell, and the shops on the northwest of the town square are ablaze.
All the children and the people from elsewhere are gathering at the square, staring at where their Mother once was. None of them move or speak. They don’t even notice the flames beginning to encircle them.
Mona walks down the stairs and out to the street.
The fire has reached the residential neighborhoods now. It is dancing up the walls and crawling across the roofs and leaping from structure to structure. The people (and the not-at-all people) watch the fire helplessly. Some do not even move or struggle as it consumes them.
One person asks her, “What do we do now? What do we do now that Mother is gone?”
But Mona has nothing to say. She climbs into the Charger, wheels it around, and points it back at the mesa again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
The People from Elsewhere look around themselves helplessly. They have waited so long for Her to return, and now She is lost again. What is there to do?
It is Mr. Elm who speaks first, whispering in his wife’s ear.
“The car?” Mrs. Elm asks. “What about the car?”
He mumbles something.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, you are right, aren’t you. The car does need work. It’s not quite right, is it?”
He shakes his head.
“No, it isn’t. I think you’re right. We do need to go home. We have some things to take care of. What if I make a nice pitcher of lemonade, just for you?”
But Mr. Elm is not listening—he turns and walks away, back to the house, back to do what he did the day before, and the day before that, and several hundred days before that.
One by one, they all agree—they have work to do. The Dawes children had planned to build a pirate ship out of sand in their sandbox, Mr. Trimley had intended to put up a new train, and Mrs. Greer must arrange for the next dinner party (which will be very nice indeed). Some of them even invite the children home, for despite their unusual appearance, the people of Wink have not seen their little siblings in so long, and taking care of one’s guests is what a proper host should do.
So, one by one, they return to their homes, and they go about their business. Even when the fire begins licking at the sides of the houses, even when it bursts through the kitchen windows and crawls across the kitchen cabinets, even when it dances in their beds and across their carpets, they do what they did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.
There is a way things should be. This is what we are. This should save us, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it? Now that we are these things, shouldn’t everything be fine?
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
The midday sun bakes everything, anything. It is so bright it has baked the blue out of the sky, the red out of the earth. The very air shimmers as if to get out of its way.
Mona sympathizes as she drives. She feels blackened, burned, both inside and out. She has walked through fire, now she is filled only with ash.
When she arrives at the mesa she sees things are much as she expected: Gracie, Parson, and her daughter sit on the shady side, under a shelf of rock. Gracie’s eyes are bright, bright red, veined and wet like peeled pomegranates. Her daughter sleeps in Gracie’s arms. The child’s fat cheeks make her lower lip jut out as though she is pouting over some recent slight.
Parson is waiting for her, as is someone else: a young girl of about ten, with mousy brown hair and yellow tennis shoes. She looks up at Mona with a piercing gaze, and she slowly stands as if this action normally causes her great pain.
“Mrs. Benjamin,” says Mona.
“Hello, dear,” says the little girl. “You’ve done quite wonderfully.”
“So that is you in there?”
“Yes. It is a bit unwieldy being so… short. But I manage.”
“It all worked?” Mona asks Parson. “You all got here safely?”
“We did,” says Parson. “Though some of us are the worse for wear.” He looks back at Gracie. “She has lost everything.”
Mona walks to Gracie, stoops, and holds her hands out. Gracie takes a moment to register this, then looks up at Mona and slowly holds out the sleeping child. Mona takes her and says, “You did a good job taking care of her, Gracie.”
Gracie stares into the stone. Her cheeks are so lacquered with tears it’s hard to see if she’s still crying. Any new ones simply dissolve and run down her face in a sheet.
“Thank you,” says Mona. “I really do thank you, Gracie.”
She sits down and holds her child in her arms. She stares at her daughter, and, without even knowing it, bends over to shelter her from the heat.
“What happened to Mother?” asks Mona.
“The wildling,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He took her body, back to… wherever he resides. I do not know why, but I do not really wish to find out. I feel the answer would be unpleasant.”
“Then it’s over?” asks Mona. “It’s really all over?”
“Nothing is ever truly over,” says Parson. “At least, in my experience. But Mother’s efforts here do seem at an end.”
The little girl wakes and looks at Mona, then spies Mona’s watch and begins picking at it with her thumb and forefinger. “You want that? Here. Here.” Mona unclasps it and hands it to the girl. She holds it out as a fisherman would his prize, and smiles in glee and disbelief. “My goodness,” whispers Mona. “Isn’t that something.”
She revels in this maternal moment for a while, basking in the presence of her child like the warmth of a fire.
“What will you do with her?” asks Parson. “Keep her? Raise her?”
“Could I?” asks Mona.
“There is nothing stopping you.”
Her daughter’s interest in the watch wanes. She flops over, rests her head on Mona’s chest, and heaves a great sigh. “She’s tired. She’s had a long day.”
She thinks, I don’t have anywhere to put her to sleep. Then, with a shrill of fear: I don’t even know what name to say when she wakes up.
Once more she remembers the look on the face of the Mona in the lens.
“But she’s so beautiful,” says Mona softly, as if arguing with someone. “She’s even more beautiful than I thought she would be…”
“She is quite terribly pretty, yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
Mona sniffs. She wants to walk away and to walk away now, because if she did she’d never revi
sit this decision and wouldn’t she be better for it? But she can’t help herself, and she says, “Parson—those alternates… the way things could have been…”
“Yes?”
“Are they… real?”
“Real in what sense?”
“I don’t know. In any sense. Or are they, like, ghosts? Echoes?”
“Well, the people in those alternates think themselves as real as the people here do. They have no reason to think otherwise. To themselves, they are real. After all—how real is the child you hold in your hands?”
Mona shakes her head. “God. God, damn it all.”
She has wanted this so much. For so long, this was all she wanted. And now she has it, with what amounts to the waving of a magic wand…
She wonders what she would be giving up were she to raise the child as her own. Would this be, in some distorted way, as if she were buying something? So many people in Wink did the same—they got to live their dream just by giving up one little thing, like an exchange. Mona looks at Gracie, and wonders if she ever saw a creature so violated and so abused in her life, a child whose parents traded away her health and sanity and dignity so they could live in peace and quiet…
The child’s tiny fingers probe the collar of Mona’s shirt with incredibly delicate movements as she drifts back to sleep.
How broken she felt when she lost her daughter. Is it possible that somewhere, in one of the strange sisters of her own time, the same thing is happening again? A grieving mother, wondering where her child is, and left feeling incomplete, as if suffering a monstrous amputation?
But she’s mine, thinks Mona. I love her. I would be good to her. I would be so good, maybe even better because I lost her once before…
It feels as if something is gripping her intestines, twisting and twirling them into one big knot.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” she whispers to the little girl. The child takes a deep breath in, and sighs it out. Tiny lungs, functioning perfectly. Her lips mime suckling. “But it wouldn’t be right, would it. You… you have a momma. They took you from her. And if I keep you I’d be part of that, and I can’t do that to her. I can’t do to her what happened to me. And I would know. I would know I’d done it. It would be inside me every day, every time I looked at you, and it would poison me. It’d poison me and it’d poison you and it would all just wind up wrong. I just… I mean, damn it, sweetheart. I just wanted to give you all the love I never got. Just a chance to put things right. I was gonna spoil you rotten, girl. I was gonna work my fingers to the bone for you. But that’s different from… from just having you. Having you is different from loving you. And I love you. I do. So I don’t think I can keep you, honey. I just don’t think I can. I want to. More than anything in the world, I want to. But I love you, so I can’t.”
She imagines desperate protestations—No, Momma, don’t send me away again… “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You won’t ever know how sorry I am. You won’t… hell, you won’t even know me, you’ll never even know that this happened. But you can’t do that to someone. You can’t make them something they’re not. Because then they’re just… window dressing. Just a face in a picture. And you mean so much more to me. So, so, so much more to me.” She kisses the child on the cheek. “But I want you to know that I love you. Someone out there loves you. I don’t know what life will hold for you, if it’ll be a good one or a bad one. But you are loved. Loved beyond words. Loved here, and… and I’m sure the momma over there loves you, too. I’m sure she does. I do, so she must. She must. How could she not?” Then, more quietly: “How could she not.”
Mona bows her head to touch her brow to her child’s. She listens to the tiny breaths for a moment. “Now come on.” She sniffs, and stands, though her legs wobble. “Let’s go home and see her.”
The lens is blank. Again, when Mona nears it she can feel it is like a door still slightly ajar.
“Are you quite sure about this?” asks Parson.
“Do it,” says Mona. Her daughter bows her back, tired of being held for so long. “Just do it.”
“We’ll need your help,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “You will need to give a push. But I think I’ve given you enough training on this, yes?”
Mona nods. The two of them start to hum, or the things inside them do. Mona faces the mirror. Her eyes search its depths. It suddenly does not seem flat, but concave, like she’s staring into half of a bubble, or maybe a tunnel…
Mona feels something give way in the mirror. And an image begins to solidify in the glass.
A yellow nursery, with polka-dotted curtains.
How she wanted that life in the mirror. How she dreamed of it.
“You can cross, if you want,” says Parson. “This is, after all, your own time, just slightly different.”
Mona looks at him, and he nods toward the silvery image. She takes a breath, and walks toward it.
She expects to feel something, as if she’s jumped into a lake or parted a veil, but there is nothing. It’s as if there’s just a hole in the world, and this pleasant nursery lies on the other side.
There is the fragrance of laundry sheets and diapers and Lysol and fresh bedding. Everything is neat and tidy; all the tiny little clothes have been properly put away; and unless she’s mistaken, there are lines in the carpet from a recent, vigorous vacuuming. Something inside her swells to see all this.
Mona wishes she knew what time it is over here; she thinks it’s just minutes after the child was originally stolen, but she isn’t sure.
She walks to the crib. The baby begins squirming, already anticipating being forced to sleep.
Do it now, or you’ll never bring yourself to do it again.
She lays her child in the crib and kisses her on the head. “Thank you for showing me that I would have been a good momma,” she whispers. “Your own momma might be kind of scared for a while. But don’t worry. She’ll get over it. It might take her a while, but… but I know she always gets over it.”
Mona begins to back away.
She knows this is the right decision, so why is she crying so much? Why does it hurt so much to accept how things are?
The child sits up and squawks a tiny protest.
Mona begins to walk back through the mirror. As she does, she hears a voice in the hall—her voice—say, “Wendy? Wendy, is that you?”
And she thinks: Wendy. Her name is Wendy. What a good name.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Through the chamber, through the door, down the dusky hall. She parts the dying memories with the blade of her hand, sends echoes scuttering over dusty stone. The spying eye of the past clapped to cracks in the air, watching, listening, snickering.
What more is there to this dark earth than halls and halls of empty rooms?
Up the ladder (her hands shake on each rung), up up and up, until the screaming red supernova erupts over her, sunlight howling and blistering and blank, pouring down the shaft to swallow her and fill her ears with silence, blissful silence.
The stone so hot her hands should sizzle. A sky shorn of clouds, all moisture scraped away. This land is so empty. And in the distance, the ribbon of black smoke, and the streak of gray where a town once stood.
I have lost her again.
She walks to the edge of the mesa. Gracie sits below, staring into the valley. She asks a question, but Mona cannot hear—she walks down and sits beside her and looks out.
In the shade the stone is cool. The air is redolent with pine sap. The wind blows southward, so each breath is free of smoke. Below her, among the trees, there is the flit of birds’ wings, and the buzzing, aimless twirl of grasshoppers.
Gracie says something. Her words have a dull ring on the shelf of stone.
“What?” Mona whispers.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Mona sits there, frozen, broken, empty.
Gracie says, “I think you did the right thing.”
She holds a hand out to Mona. Mona bows her head, reaches out,
and takes it and squeezes and holds on as hard as she can, just as hard as she possibly can.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
They sit in silence for what feels like lifetimes. After a while Mona realizes Mrs. Benjamin and Parson are watching them from down the path. She feels a wave of irrational rage, for they did this to her, they or their kind, but she swallows it to ask, “What do you want?”
“To ask something of you,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“We have discussed it in detail,” says Parson, “and we have decided that, though there are many things to endear us to this way of life”—he exchanges a glance with Mrs. Benjamin, who nods—“it would be best for us to go home.”
“Home? You mean to—”
“To the other side, yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“You can do that?”
“There is no one now to say that we cannot,” says Parson. “And with the lens, we have concluded it is perfectly possible. It should be just a short step away. I do not know what state it’s in—Mother’s machinations likely left our home quite in ruins. But that does not mean it cannot be rebuilt. With Her gone, perhaps there is some hope.”
“What about the rest of you?”
“I believe most of them perished in the fire,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “They, or their vessels, or their physical forms. They are no longer bound to this world. They are, most likely, on the other side already, in some fashion or another. Lost, drifting, helpless… it would simply be a matter of reuniting them, and giving them a little leadership.”
“Then you could do all this again,” says Gracie. “You could come back, and try all over again…”
“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “For one, Mother is no longer with us, so I doubt if we would have any motivation to return. And for another, we will not have the lens.”
American Elsewhere Page 63
