by Lou Aronica
“It will. It will come. Just remember to look at all the angles.”
“Gain a little perspective?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll try. I wish this were easier, but I’ll try.”
Her father tipped his head toward her again and Miea felt another warm wave. For more than a minute, the restorative energy flowed over her, though they shared no words.
Then he said, “Wait.”
“What?”
“Just wait.”
At that moment, her father’s face shimmered into innumerable points of light and scattered into the darkness. Miea felt a few of the points pass through her own incorporeal form as they dispersed.
Everything was dark again.
Time passed.
Miea did what her father told her to do.
She waited.
Becky felt incredibly tired. The depths of sleep exerted a strong and, initially, unsettling pull on her. Given how she felt, she wouldn’t have thought she’d be sleeping anytime soon. Slowly, she surrendered to the pull. She really had no choice—it was that strong.
“This meeting will enrich.”
Becky heard the voice like it was inside and outside of her head at the same time. Now she was hearing voices, too? She was getting sick, her father was abandoning her, and she was going crazy—life just didn’t get any better than this. Meanwhile, what did “this meeting will enrich” mean, anyway?
“Limitless imaginations create.”
Gee, that made way more sense. If she was going to start hearing voices, it would be nice if the voices said something a little easier to understand.
Becky felt herself falling, even though she knew she was already lying down. This wasn’t like going to sleep at all. Was this yet another new symptom, something else to worry about? Was lying in bed going to become as unpredictable as bending over or moving too quickly?
Still, she didn’t feel dizzy. In fact, she didn’t feel out of control at all. It felt like she was headed somewhere. A tiny piece of her started to panic, but the rest of her found this fascinating. Maybe losing her mind wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Maybe she’d enjoy being a crazy person.
Becky noticed something formless in the darkness. As she got closer—how was she moving?—the image began to come together. It was the back of a woman’s head. A head with golden, lustrous strands of hair like her cousin Kiley’s. The head turned and Becky saw the woman’s face—and instantly she knew who it was.
Limitless imaginations create.
A part of her brain told her that it wasn’t possible for this woman to be who she thought she was, but then another part of her brain reminded her that none of this should be possible.
The face looked at her. It seemed a little confused, a little unsure. Becky continued to move closer, her body—or whatever it was that she had out here—traveling entirely on its own. If she ever summoned the guts to tell Lonnie about this, it would make a heck of a story. Finally, she was mere feet from the face—just a disembodied face. It dawned on Becky that this should feel pretty creepy. But it didn’t feel that way at all. What she felt was indescribable. Maybe that was appropriate, considering she’d never had an experience even remotely like this before. Had anyone?
“Princess Miea?” she said tentatively. Becky half expected her voice to sound as strange as this place was, but she sounded just like herself.
The face across from her seemed surprised. “You know who I am?”
“I guess I would know you anywhere. Even here.”
The woman made an obvious effort to figure out what this meant. Becky noticed now that the woman was older than she imagined her. She’d always been a teenager in Becky’s mind, but this Princess Miea seemed to be in her early twenties.
“Do I know you?” the face said.
“No, we’ve never met before.”
“Then how do you know me ?”
You’ve been in my head as long as I can remember , Becky thought. That wasn’t a particularly helpful explanation, though. “I created a lot of stories about you, and about Tamarisk, and about the king and the queen, and about the bloat marshes, and the Rainbow Fair, and the dancepoodles—”
The woman’s eyes opened wide. “You know about my dancepoodle?”
“Yeah, I kinda made it up. At least I thought I made it up. Now I’m not so sure.”
The woman seemed sad suddenly. “I had a—companion, I suppose you would call it—when I was younger. It was a four-legged animal with pink, curly hair, and it performed the most entertaining dances. I loved that animal so much, but no one else remembers it—or the existence of dancepoodles at all. I’ve never seen one in the kingdom and there is no record of them anywhere. Except in my heart.”
Becky wondered why she mentioned dancepoodles in the first place. She’d invented them when she was little and then uninvented them when she got older and decided that Tamarisk should be more exotic and that no one in the kingdom should own pets.
“I changed the stories,” Becky said.
“The stories?”
“The stories I told about Tamarisk. I wanted them to be more sophisticated, so I got rid of dancepoodles.” Becky tried to remember some other early creations. “And salmoladies—they were very smart fish—and caramelpetals, a really tasty flower.”
“Caramelpetals,” the woman said softly, almost nostalgically.
The woman closed her eyes for a long moment. She appeared to be meditating. When she opened them again, her expression had changed.
“You allowed us to happen,” she said carefully.
“You think? Maybe. I guess.” This was all so totally strange. Here she was, floating in space talking to the princess of the fantasy stories she used to create with her dad. Yet that wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was that it didn’t feel at all weird to be doing this.
“Are you a god?”
Becky laughed out loud. “I am definitely not a god. Just ask my father. I’m not sure he even thinks I’m a person anymore.”
“But you brought us into being.”
It was Becky’s turn not to say something for a few moments. Had she actually created Tamarisk? Had she actually created Tamarisk? “I don’t think that’s how it worked,” she said, not entirely sure why she said that. Becky noticed that the darkness around Princess Miea was starting to change. She thought she could make out parts of the rest of the woman’s body and a bit of a room around her. Becky glanced behind herself, expecting to see some of her bedroom, but there was nothing there.
“There’s a reason why this is happening,” Miea said. “There’s a reason why we’ve been brought together.”
“This meeting will enrich.”
“What did you say?”
“Something someone just said to me.”
“Who?”
Yeah, great question . “I don’t have a clue. Do you have any idea why this is happening now?”
The princess lowered her eyes, and when she looked up again, she had a slightly sheepish expression on her face. “No idea at all.” She chuckled to herself and then added, “I’ve had the most awful day imaginable.”
“Mine hasn’t been so great, either. And now I’m hallucinating.”
The princess’s expression became more serious. “You’re not, you know.”
Becky looked into the woman’s eyes for several seconds. It was like looking at someone she’d known her entire life.
“Yes, I know.”
She did. Instantly. Though none of it made the least bit of sense.
Miea had been talking to the girl in this once-darkness for several minutes now. The girl’s form seemed to be emerging, and Miea could see the outline of a bed around her. The girl didn’t seem like a god. In fact, she seemed like one of the friends Miea had had in high school or college back before everything changed. The girl was definitely the one who had brought Tamarisk into being, though. Every instinct told Miea this was true. How else could the girl know about dancep
oodles and caramelpetals? It was possible this was all an elaborate deception—after all, Miea had mentioned both “lost” things to others over the years— but Miea was somehow sure that it wasn’t. This was what she was supposed to “wait” for.
“I’m not a princess anymore. I’m the queen now.”
“The queen? But what about your mother and father?”
“Dead,” Miea said, still surprised by how sad that admission could make her. “There was a terrible accident a few years ago.”
The girl lowered her head. “Dead. That’s horrible.” She looked up then and Miea could see that this genuinely affected her. “That must be incredibly tough for you.”
“The vexing thing is how I can’t even begin to get over it. After all this time, it still hurts every time I think about it.”
“Yeah, I know a little something about that.”
“Your parents?”
The girl shook her head. “They’re not dead. But sometimes it feels like the family we used to have is dead.”
Miea couldn’t understand what the girl was talking about, but it was obvious that thinking about it made the girl very upset. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” The girl looked past her, focusing directly behind her. Miea wondered what she saw back there and she looked in that direction again, seeing nothing. “What is this place?”
“I’m not sure. I just wanted to have a conversation with my father—”
“—I thought your father was dead.”
“He is. I wanted to have a conversation with him in my head, to imagine the kind of advice he would give me—and I found myself here.”
“With me.”
Miea smiled. “With you. What were you searching for?”
The girl raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “I didn’t know I was searching. But now that I think about it, just before this happened, I asked for help.”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. Anyone.”
“Maybe there’s something out here for both of us. Not that you could tell from looking around.”
“I’m Becky, by the way. Do I refer to you as Your Majesty?”
Miea cringed. “It would be great if you were the one person I knew who didn’t. And it doesn’t seem appropriate under the circumstances.”
“What are the circumstances?”
“I guess that’s something for both of us to find out.”
Miea noticed a glint in Becky’s eyes then that she hadn’t seen before. This wasn’t at all what she’d expected when she closed her eyes to “gain perspective” in her chamber. Still, after one of the most perplexing days of her life, this kind of surprise was more than welcome.
“You can call me Miea.”
“Thanks. I always loved that name.”
“Thanks. I’ve always loved it as well.”
“Are we in Tamarisk?”
Miea thought about this for a moment. “I don’t think so. Maybe we’re in the place that you come from.”
“This is definitely not Connecticut. At least any part of Connecticut that I’ve ever seen.”
“Then we’re someplace else. A third place; a place where we could meet.”
“Do things like this happen to you regularly?”
“Never before. But I’m glad it’s happening now.”
Becky smiled and the glint in her eyes grew. “Yeah, me too. Do you really think there’s a reason why we’ve met?”
“I think there has to be. I suppose that’s something we’ll learn together.”
Miea felt her form move farther from the girl. As the distance grew between them, she wondered if this was some sort of indication that this meeting was going to be their only one. At some point, the movement stopped, though. Becky was still visible, if only barely. Miea could see Becky’s entire body now, lying on a bed.
As she watched, the darkness between them somehow became darker still. A dense black path connected her to her captivating new friend.
“Teach her about the path,” said the voice that was neither hers, Becky’s, nor her father’s. The words meant nothing to her.
She looked at the lightless space that led to Becky.
Suddenly, she understood the voice.
“Before you leave,” Miea said, hopefully loud enough for Becky to hear, “there’s something else I need to tell you. Something that will keep us in contact.”
7
Somehow, in his anger, Chris had managed to forget that Polly was coming by the apartment early on Sunday to pick up Becky. Only when the doorman buzzed his intercom at 8:30 did he remember that they had some outing related to Al’s family. He thumbed the intercom to tell the doorman to send Al and Polly up, and then he went to Becky’s room to roust her. She was fast asleep and in no mood to get up.
“Come on, you need to get going. You know your mother isn’t going to want to stand around here waiting for you.”
Not any more than he wanted to stand around waiting with her. Polly had only been to the apartment a handful of times—pickup and drop-off somehow had become his responsibility—and he was always uncomfortable when she was there. He imagined her scrutinizing his choice of furniture and every appointment in the living room, telling herself that it hardly compared with Becky’s “real home.”
Considering they had a child in common, he’d spent remarkably little time with Polly over the past four years. At school functions, they tended to position themselves on opposite sides of the room. At the middle school graduation party Polly threw for Becky, he absented himself after a half hour. If Becky wasn’t ready when Chris came to pick her up, Polly would usually open the door for him and then leave him standing in the foyer to wait alone.
There had been that one time about six months after they split that Becky insisted the three of them go out to dinner together. Becky made all the arrangements, including choosing the restaurant, and Chris waited fifteen minutes for the two of them to arrive, having stressed over bridge traffic with concerns that he himself would be late. The dinner was unremittingly awkward. Chris was still very angry with Polly and still teetering from her decision to reject him, and he found he had little to say other than asking about her family and a couple of the neighbors. As a result, he directed nearly all of his attention at Becky, using such stimulating conversation starters as, “So that math test you had last week turned out to be really easy, right?”
Now, ten minutes after Polly and Al walked into the living room, he didn’t even have that option. He had no idea why it was taking Becky so long to get dressed. She didn’t need makeup for this outing (though it was entirely possible that she’d still want to wear some), so this should have been a matter of simply throwing on some clothes, brushing her teeth, brushing her hair, and getting out here. She had to know how much he hated having to entertain her mother and stepfather.
“Do you guys want some coffee or something?”
Polly shook her head and looked off toward Becky’s room. “We really need to get going. The drive is at least a couple hours.”
Chris shrugged. “Want me to go prod her again?”
Polly smirked. “Will that accomplish anything more than it did the last time?”
Al walked over to the coffee table. “Monty Python. I love these guys.” He picked up the box holding the DVD for Monty Python and the Holy Grail , the movie Chris had planned to watch with Becky last night after they got home from their drive—until things once again crumbled between them.
“Yeah, they’re great,” Chris said, moving toward the couch and Al, happy to be farther from Polly’s increasingly impatient form.
“Are you a ‘Knights who Say Ni’ guy or a ‘Killer Bunny’ guy?”
“I didn’t realize I had to be one or the other. To tell you the truth, I think I’m probably a Black Knight guy.”
“It’s just a flesh wound,” Al said animatedly and then gazed at the box admiringly. “Truly great cinema.”
“ Casablanca and then Holy Grail .”
“Don’t forget Caddyshack .”
“Right, of course.”
“Did you guys watch this last night?”
“Didn’t get around to it.” Chris flashed on the evening’s climax. Had he really told Becky that he was giving up? What kind of parent said something like that to his child?
“That’s really too bad.” Al looked over at Polly. “Polly just loves Monty Python, don’t you, hon?”
Polly scowled at him. “Yes, they’re up there with people who can burp the alphabet as standard-bearers for high art.”
Al leaned toward Chris and said confidentially, “We’ve watched this movie six times together.”
Chris chuckled and couldn’t think of an appropriate way to continue this conversation. Clearly neither could Al, and silence returned.
Chris decided to sit down on the love seat. He looked at Polly. “You might as well sit for a few minutes. If Becky’s trying to decide what to wear, I might need to make you dinner.”
Polly rolled her eyes and walked over to the couch, clearly miffed at the indignity of having to accept this level of hospitality from her ex-husband. As she did, she called out, “Beck, today, okay?”
“I’ll be right there.”
A couple minutes later, Becky streamed into the room looking bright, in surprisingly good spirits, and utterly oblivious to any discomfort she might have caused her parents. Polly, Al, and Chris stood simultaneously as she entered, and the four of them made their way to the door. As they did so, Al playfully wagged a scolding finger at Becky and she punched him lightly on the shoulder. Chris felt a little pinprick watching the exchange.
Polly opened the door and moved into the hallway. Al joined her. Before Becky went with them, she pulled Chris on the arm, reached up, and kissed him on the cheek. After last night, that was enough of a surprise.
It wasn’t the only one, though. With their heads close together, she whispered, “Dad, you’re not going to believe this: Tamarisk is real.” Then she kissed him again and bounded away.
The announcement so stunned Chris that he didn’t think to ask her for an explanation until she’d gone down the hall. He just stood there, head tipped forward and staring out the doorway long after the others entered the elevator.
