The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  George loves that case. Whatever adventure we’re on, it’s stocked. I’ve seen him pull a gun out of it, a book of spells, roses, the keys to an Aston Martin DB5….I imagine him now, fiddling with the lock he broke ages ago, looking at me with adventure written in his eyes.

  Click goes the attaché case. I wonder what he has in store for me today.

  I imagine it, but I can’t write that down.

  But then, what difference does it make? This kind of thing does not simply go away without an explanation. Not when there’s property damage and insurance claims involved.

  I am stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, as Dad would say. Write it down and they’ll think I’m crazy. Don’t write it down and I’ll look like I have something to hide.

  Well, if I’ve learned anything from explorers and detectives, it’s that the very best journals aren’t full of confessions, they’re full of observations. When you go on adventures, you don’t have to fill your journal pages with mopey thoughts about boys and gossip and self-indulgent, self-pitying feelings. When you’re amazing, you just write down the things you saw and did and that’s enough.

  Maybe I’m not exactly on a quest, but I won’t bore myself with feelings and confessions, even though that’s what Dr. Roberts obviously wants. Instead, here is what I observe:

  I am in St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which I know because of the bright, friendly decorating and the giant signs that say that basically everywhere.

  Not exactly Sherlock Holmes–level deduction, that one.

  My loaner pajamas have small bears on them. My room has no phone, limited television stations, and blue curtains. No roommates. There’s some kind of a desk where the nurses sit down the hall, presumably with a line of sight past my door. This would be more relevant to any fantasy of escape if I could walk. My leg is in a cast, and I know, somewhere in my brain under an ocean of morphine, it hurts like hell. I have been isolated, but I never seem to be alone. There’s always someone with me or checking on me, every second, every hour, even into the night.

  All those things are real. All those things are true. I observed them and wrote them down. I know the difference between real and pretend, and that is how I know that I am not insane. No matter what they tell me, I’m not crazy.

  Because, you see, Dr. Roberts is a psychiatrist—that I remember—and it’s no accident that she’s been interrogating me. And that is not good. That is not good at all.

  I will admit to one feeling: I’m scared I’m really in trouble this time.

  Oh God, I miss George.

  It used to be if I couldn’t fall asleep, I would spend those hours with him. Going out on weird little missions, or sitting around talking about nothing. We would walk around in the afterthought of humidity that clings to these St. Louis days. In the suburbs, the streets are safe and cool, and there’s never anyone outside after midnight. My bedroom in the basement is great for that. You can creep out the cellar door without a sound. My room doesn’t have any windows, so I take a lot of naps during the day. I sleep a lot, and then I can’t sleep when I’m supposed to, but the plus side is that I never have to be awake with everyone else either.

  I can’t even think of George here, let alone go anywhere with him. Sometimes my mind starts to wander and I can feel myself slipping and him pulling at me, but then I notice and snap out of it. Because what if someone saw me? What if someone saw the empty shell that keeps me tethered to this world, its lips moving and smiling while the real me is somewhere else?

  I’m here alone in the dark and I don’t know what to do.

  I feel like crying, but tears won’t bring him back. That’s what Ole Golly said in Harriet the Spy. I read that book a million times when I was younger, and it was like Ole Golly herself was there with me, guiding me. But you know, Ole Golly leaves Harriet in that book, for no good reason. And Harriet just has to accept that, and I never liked that part of the story. So I would pretend she actually was coming back right after the book ended, even though that’s not the point.

  “Your parents will be here first thing tomorrow,” Dr. Roberts tells me. I wake up. I’ve been lost in thought. How did she get here? How long have we been talking? “They’re on their way from Germany now.” I know I talked to them when they called, but I can’t remember. Everything is hazy and weird.

  “Are they taking me home?”

  “Not quite yet. Tomorrow we’re going to move you out of this room and into another ward, where we can give you more of the attention you need.”

  “Because of my leg?”

  “No, because of your mind.”

  That is such an amazing villain line. It sounds so evil, even though she probably thinks she’s being gentle. That makes it even more villainous, that knife twist of kindness.

  “Sadie, do you remember what we’ve been talking about?” she asks. I nod, even though I don’t.

  “You’ll see. It’ll be good to have a few days’ rest.”

  “My parents will take me home.”

  “It’s already been discussed, Sadie. You’re spending a few days here with us, in a controlled environment, just until we’re sure everything’s okay.”

  “What do you mean ‘everything’?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” she replies. “We have a lot to talk about with your parents. But when you and I talk, everything we say is completely confidential. Absolutely private. And I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I need you to tell me about George. Did he hurt you? Are you afraid? No one can get to you here, Sadie. You can tell me about George.”

  And there it is. The one thing I can’t tell her. The one thing I must never write down.

  It’s all coming down around me. I need to get out of here, and I need to keep my secret. George is both my devil and my deep blue sea. He’s the one key to my freedom. They want to know who he is and where he went and why I was screaming his name after the crash.

  And the reason I can’t answer any of that, of course, is because George isn’t real.

  George and Sadie knew the Hogwarts Library the way only two Ravenclaws could. Tricks were for Gryffindors. They needed no Invisibility Cloak to sneak around after dark into the stacks. They knew the whorls in the dust, the moonlight glint off every pane of stained glass, and most important, the exact location of the book they needed to pass through the next task of the Triwizard Tournament.

  “Over here!” Sadie whispered. She climbed up a rolling ladder without a creak. The spines were dusty, but she could still make out the titles.

  “Hang on, this is the missing volume of the Book of Memory I was looking for last week,” George said, distracted by a dusty tome that had been abandoned on a cart. “Damned disrespectful. This is the one with all the methods for countering Obliviate, and all the truly scary memory spells as well. You could change the past with this, you know. See, if absolutely no one remembered something, it would be like it never happened. No wonder it’s in the restricted section.”

  “George, we haven’t time for this.” George rolled his eyes. Her posh accent made her sound like an insufferable know-it-all.

  “Well, I’m certainly putting it back where it belongs, anyway. They really ought to put all this in order.”

  “George! This is not the time—”

  “What are you doing in here?” the nurse asked. Sadie fell back into her hospital room and snapped to attention. Her mouth was still full of words she had been mumbling to no one. The nurse paused in the doorway, then came into Sadie’s room to look around.

  “Nothing,” Sadie muttered, her face burning. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “No one. I wasn’t…Can I just go to bed now?” The nurse raised an eyebrow.

  “That sounds like a good idea. It’s late, Sadie. You go to sleep now. Don’t make me
come back in here.”

  The nurse flipped off the lights and Sadie’s head spun with panic. Her heart pounded as she contemplated how close she’d come to letting someone see her talking with George. She’d almost been caught, and it was worse than ever: she didn’t even remember when she’d drifted into the fantasy. In the dark, she couldn’t focus on the room around her. All she could think about was herself and her feelings.

  Her leg ached inside its cast, and the rest of her itched under unfamiliar covers. She wanted her own pajamas. She wanted her own room. She closed her eyes and felt tears seeping out onto her pillow.

  She wanted to go home to George.

  But she couldn’t. It wasn’t safe.

  Instead, she closed her eyes and in her head recited all the Beatles songs she knew by heart. She focused on each line, like praying. She prayed her way through album after album, tear after tear escaping her sleepy eyes.

  Her eyes closed, she heard the sound of a lighter flipping open, then igniting.

  “Are we alone?” George asked, revealed behind the door as he pushed it closed. He lit his cigarette, and smoke began to fill the room.

  “George!” she cried. She sprang out of bed, and when she wrapped her arms around him, he seemed so thin under his suit, like he was barely there. “You came,” she whimpered into his chest.

  “Of course I came, darling. But we need to be careful. You don’t know what they’ll do to us. What they’ll do to you.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Sadie begged. “Please. Don’t leave me alone here.”

  “All right, darling, all right. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.” She held him tighter and he let out a moan. She inspected him in the dim light. Had he been injured in the crash?

  But the moment she began to notice all his scars and bruises—a lifetime of pain—they were gone. His face was as clean and smooth and pale and young as it always had been.

  “Where should we go?” Sadie asked.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere far away,” George said. He grabbed her hand. “Darling, we have to run as far from here as we can get.”

  * * *

  In the black nothing—the same nothing at the start of every story—George tapped his fingernails on the side of his rocks glass. The music of it broke through the darkness, creating the world around them note by note. The whole world started with George.

  Sadie took a sip of tea from her little blue cup. It was broken with cracks of gold. Kintsugi, she recalled, was the name for it: a broken cup made whole, better than before. She could smell the whiskey in George’s cocktail: an old-fashioned.

  Where had they traveled now? She had grown used to figuring out their universe as she wandered through it. Sometimes she wondered if she created the world by seeing it, or if it had always been there waiting to be seen. George belonged automatically wherever they went. He was forever the same—eighteen and beautiful—but somehow placeless and timeless. Sadie always had to decide who she would be. She could be an explorer, or a princess, or a spy. Anything. This time, she felt like she might be stuck as herself.

  She wrapped her hospital gown around her until it felt like a straitjacket. “Something terrible is happening, George. I just can’t remember what.”

  “I know,” George said, but offered no help.

  She took a deep breath, another sip of tea, and began the revelation of the world.

  They were sitting in a small room with a glass wall on one side that peered out into darkness. She couldn’t see any farther than the candlelight from their table, where her beautiful tea set reconfigured with gold stood next to George’s cocktail torture implements: strainers and stabbers and spoons and all sorts of tools she wasn’t quite sure how to use. The room was small and dim, with black fleur-de-lis wallpaper cut from the set of some BBC drama she couldn’t quite place. There were no doors, but the walls were lined with bookshelves. In gold on one of the aging leather spines, she could make out a faded title: The Wizard Prince and the Book of Memory.

  The candlelight isn’t enough to see anything, she thought. As though answering her, a chandelier above them began to glow. She looked up as the Edison bulbs lit their eerie filaments, the light flooding the small room and the place beyond the glass.

  Sadie stood and went to the window. It looked out into a hall lined with rooms much like their own: little glass prisons. Their dim lights faintly illuminated the cells.

  The room across the hall held her favorite corner of the Hogwarts library, a dusty book lying open on the table. The wind leafed through its pages and snuffed the candle out. The room next to that was a squalid safe house they’d once used in Moscow. On the other side, she spied the outside of a café she knew in Rio, normally a bustling spot. Drinks sat out as though all the customers had stepped away only moments ago.

  All the rooms were empty sets. The hairs on her arms stood up. Not a soul was there. She and George were all alone.

  George heaved himself up and stood beside her.

  “Where are we?” Sadie asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” He put his hand on the glass wall in front of them and, with a cheeky grin, slid it aside.

  He jumped down from the high window box. Then he lifted Sadie down slowly, his hands on her waist.

  Her bare feet recoiled from the icy stone floor. Its silver insets traced the orbits of planets and stars, forming a celestial map. It was exactly like the ballroom floor in the Star Palace, their most secret hideaway. George had once told her that people believed fate was in the dance of those intertwining paths. So when they danced in their ballroom, their destiny was in the sky above them and below their feet.

  But this was not the Star Palace. They’d never been here before.

  The long hall had big open doors on both ends. The dioramas stretched to the very ends.

  “It’s a museum,” Sadie said.

  “Except we’re the ones on display,” George said. “Look, there’s Old Charlotte.” He pointed to the shell of a smashed truck upside down against a tree. One of the wheels was still spinning.

  Sadie turned away from it. The image woke a monster inside her. She could feel it clawing its way out. She couldn’t think about it. She didn’t dare. She looked toward the end of the hall. There she spotted a big map painted on the wall in the next hallway. Its labyrinthine paths twined like the branches of the Tree of Life.

  Sadie heaved a sigh of relief. She loved museums. She was an old hand at sailing through wings and galleries. She consulted the map and figured they were in the “Recent Acquisitions and Highlights” section. A few others jumped out: a portrait hall, a special exhibit on cryptographic technology, and a star in the center of the map that seemed to glow. The Star Palace, she thought.

  The Star Palace was the end of every adventure, and the site of every climax. It didn’t matter if they were playing spies or wizards, if they were detectives or royalty: they always found their way to the palace at the end. That was where happy endings were possible. After a victory, they would dance under a glass ceiling of immutable stars. When the costumes were off and they were no one but themselves, they always took a few moments to enjoy their sanctuary. They would stand on their beautiful balcony and stare out into the lands they had created and remember that no matter how horrible things seemed, all these universes were theirs forever. They were free to confess their greatest fears and admit their greatest sorrows. Not even a diary could offer the safety of the palace.

  But it wasn’t always easy to get to.

  They needed a door, and those only appeared when they had been earned, or when they were needed most. It would take a journey to find it.

  One star, glowing. What else could it mean?

  She traced the path with her finger. The museum must have been huge.

  “Which way should we go?” George asked. Sadie wasn’t entirely sure. The paths seem
ed to bend and twist as she followed them, changing their minds, changing the map.

  “Away,” she said finally. “To seek and find.”

  “To seek and find,” he replied, slipping his hand into hers.

  She turned back to look at the room where they had arrived. A label above the glass read “Sadie and George: the last adventure?”

  She shuddered. Already the light inside had begun to fade.

  * * *

  They spotted familiar landmarks, each one more and more bewildering. In the Classics hall, they passed the king’s bedchambers, where Sadie had once told George one thousand tales to calm his wrath. The whistle of a distant train in the next room called them to a hall filled with a hundred railcars on tracks to nowhere. They’d ridden each of these trains during Sadie’s detective novel phase, sharing in the locomotive obsession of their authors. In the cafeteria, they sampled treats from all over the world. Sadie reached into the abandoned buffet to taste treacle tart and tomato sandwiches.

  They passed under filigree arches and stained glass windows as they journeyed to the star on the map. It seemed like the more wondrous the surroundings, the farther they were away. Every distraction took them in the wrong direction: George bounded off to admire a statue of himself in all his princely splendor—white coat, white gloves—and the next thing they knew they were twice as far away as they had been. They couldn’t help but let the warm silence of the museum wrap them up and comfort them. It was almost as beautiful as the Star Palace itself. Sadie wasn’t even angry that they were hopelessly lost. What more could she want? All around her was the story of Sadie and George.

  They were somewhere along the outer edge of the building, in a hazy polar dawn Sadie had once dreamed of seeing in the Antarctic winter. The sun would never rise, only threaten light.