“Why does it need to? What’s the point of even trying to live if we all just end up where George is?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.” I laughed; so did Alex. “I haven’t figured out what the point of anything is, but I do know that there’s so many awesome things in life that make it kinda worth living.”
“Like what?” he said dismissively. He didn’t really want an answer, I could tell, but he needed one.
“Like your favorite foods,” I offered, “and rides at a theme park, and songs that make you feel things, and books that tell you things you never knew before; colors on pictures that make you think about things you never thought about before. And there’s love.”
“You keep trying to give me all these reasons to move on, Red, but love? Come on. What the heck is the point of that? It doesn’t heal; it doesn’t save the world; it doesn’t do anything people say it does, except hurt and make you feel really alone.”
“Yeah.” I sat back, nodding as I thought about that—thought about how I’d felt all these months without Alex, and how much the love for George hurt now. “But it also gets you through. It makes you believe there’s something better when you’re in a world that really sucks. And when love isn’t busy being sucky, it’s a pretty awesome feeling too.”
Alex finally looked at me again, this time like he understood what I understood.
“You were gone,” he said.
“I know.”
“I needed you.”
“I needed you too.”
He pressed his lips into a line again and sniffed hard. “Why are you back?”
“I killed my husband, and his son set me free.”
“What?” He wasn’t sure if I was for real. “That sounds like one hell of a story.”
“It is.” I got up and walked over to his window, tired of my hands feeling stiff and my cheeks cold. “And I’ll tell it to you when you finally let yourself…” As the window shut into place and the cold cut off, taking the noise of the wind with it, I heard him. It was so quiet at first that I held my breath, but then it got louder as the sobs took control of his body and used his voice to express their agony. He cried loudly, rolling away when I came back to sit down with him, so I just wrapped my arms around his waist, pressed my body to his back, and held onto him while the grief made him tremble.
Part Four: Chapter Four
Grim is the Man Who Holds His Tears
Sometimes tears can make us stronger. And sometimes they can make it all hurt worse for a bit. But there’s always another side. There’s always a dark tunnel you have to walk through that eventually does come out on an open field. You don’t feel better, necessarily, and you can’t go back to what was before because hurt changes us, but without the tears you’ll never notice the so-called greener pastures on the other side of grief.
Alex cried for a very long time. After a while, he didn’t even notice I was there. Then, when he was done crying, he went numb all over. He stared at the wall for so long that I got scared. Scared enough that I called my mom. She left work right away. She looked him over and covered him with a blanket, taking my hand and telling me to leave him be.
As his door closed into place, Mom took a good look around for the first time since her initial reel in shock when she walked in the front door. “Where is Alex’s dad?” she asked.
“Downstairs. In the room that used to be George’s.”
“Why hasn’t he been taking care of Alex?”
“Because he’s not in a much better state,” I said simply.
A worried expression crossed Mom’s face. “Take me to him.”
We passed back down the creaky old stairs, minding our steps around smashed-up inventions and bags of rubbish, left there on the sidelines of this sad life as if someone had once tried to improve things but gave up soon after. When the old playroom door opened and darkness met us, Mom did the same thing I had earlier, taking the smell and almost breaking down the contents with her wolfish nose and gathering a few facts about Plain’s health based on what she smelled. But unlike me Mom didn’t hesitate to enter. She rushed to the shape in the chair by the desk and knelt down, touching his hand. At first I thought she was comforting him, until I realized as I got closer and my eyes adjusted to the dark again, that she was taking his pulse.
“Mom?”
“April.” Her voice had a hint of restrained tension. “Go get my phone out of my purse—in the car.”
I backed out of the room and rushed into the harsh bright light of day, shielding my eyes to see as I tripped my way down the newspaper driveway and got into the car. My hands were shaking by the time I handed the phone to Mom. She took it and stood up, crossing one arm over her waist as she dialed three digits. My heart caved in on itself.
“Yes, I need an ambulance,” she said. “It’s 26 Jacob Street in Wilhelm.”
“Mom?” I said again, this time in a more panicked voice, standing by as she gave the operator more details, using her ‘nurse’ lingo.
“Two minutes,” she said, hanging up the phone. “There’s one in the area.”
“What’s wrong with him? Is he okay?”
“He’ll be fine, sweetie.” She put her arm around me and pulled me close. “He’s just dehydrated, maybe a bit malnourished.”
“But they can fix him, right?”
She nodded, kissing my head.
I drew away to squat down by Plain, touching his cold, dry wrist. He looked up suddenly and smiled.
“Oh, Red. It’s you.”
“Hi,” I said, whispering because it felt wrong to talk in a normal voice here.
“It’s been a long time,” he said, hazed.
“It’s been an hour,” I corrected.
“I’m s… I’m sorry, Red. But Alex isn’t here today.”
I looked up at Mom. She frowned, concerned.
“Yes he is…”
“No, he went with George—to see the birds.”
“No, Alex is upstairs,” I insisted. “Sleeping.”
“He is?” Plain’s brows moved into a tight frown, his eyes drifting off to the left. “Maybe I dreamed it then.”
“Dreamed what?”
He ignored me and looked across the room, nodding at something. “Mom left.”
I glanced back at the empty cage. “I know.”
“Everyone left,” he added more solemnly.
“Alex didn’t. Alex is upstairs—”
“No. Alex left too, Red. And Sacha.”
My heart leapt with worry. “Where did she go?”
He didn’t answer.
“Plain,” I said, shaking him gently awake as he drifted off.
“April.” Mom stopped me. “It’s okay. Sacha’s probably fine.”
“How do you know?”
“She was picked up by the ranger last week. He must have seen the state of this place and decided not to bring her back this time.”
“Back?”
“Oh right, you wouldn’t know. Sacha’s the talk of the town. After George died, she went to his grave every day and lay on it.”
“Really?”
Mom nodded. “It was in the papers.”
“Then, if the ranger was here, why didn’t he do anything about Plain?”
“He probably didn’t realize how bad things were, sweetie.” She looked around. “Unless he came inside, how could he?”
I nodded, figuring that maybe the last time he came to drop Sacha home Plain didn’t answer the door. But how could Alex not be worried about her? Then again, he probably wasn’t aware of much outside the radius of his agony right now. Who could blame him? He might have even thought Plain was caring for Sacha, and maybe wondered why he hadn’t been caring for him.
The ambulance arrived a few moments later. After assessing Plain, they took him away immediately, with tubes and a mask and worried faces. He wasn’t conscious when they loaded him onto the gurney. He didn’t even wake when they pricked his skin to get fluids into him.
“He’ll be
fine,” one of the guys said to me, giving me a reassuring smile. “He just needs some rest.”
I nodded, watching then as they drove away, lights on. “What now?” I said to Mom.
“Now.” She glanced up at the old blue house. “I’ll go down to the supermarket and get some vegetables. Carne knows there’s probably none in that house. And you can go find some garbage bags. It’s time we cleaned that mess up.”
While Mom was gone, I used all the love in my heart for Alex and Plain to work faster and harder. A part of me felt like maybe, by fixing what was broken in the heart of their home, I might be able to fix the heart itself. But it was just so sad here now that my own heart almost couldn’t take it. I could literally see the phases of grief Plain went through in the chaos about the house: anger, apathy, maybe even bargaining. So many of his inventions had been smashed up, and some had even been partially repaired, the scars of that damage still lingering. Photos of George were laid face down in places while others were in odd spots, like the freezer and under Plain’s pillow on his bed.
Their world had clearly fallen apart without George, but I was determined to put it back together.
***
I wish I could say that only days passed until Plain came home; that only days passed before Alex noticed anyone in the room with him again. But it was weeks. We cleaned up their house and Mom took leave to care for them, cooking meals and making sure they ate every day. We even managed to track down Sacha and free her from the pound, hoping she’d reach Alex, or even Plain, in some way. But she was just a fixture at their sides—one that kept running away to sit with George again, trying to bring him back.
I only saw Alex for a few hours after school, but other than accepting his homework and handing me what he’d completed, he didn’t really say anything. When he cried that first day something broke in him, as if maybe George knew that would happen and that’s why he asked him not to cry. Mom told me it’d be fine. She said Alex had a lot to work through in his head right now, that not being cared for properly—for which she even tried to blame herself—had made both Plain and Alex worse than they might have otherwise been, and when he was ready he’d join the land of the living again. In the meantime, I just had to focus on my studies—working really hard to catch up so I didn’t have to repeat a grade like Alex did. We’d graduate together if all went well from here, and I was looking forward to that day.
I was looking forward to the day Alex would return to school. I hadn’t made any new friends yet, but despite that I’d abandoned my old ones because, truthfully, Mom had been right all along. They were never good friends. And now that I’d returned as the supposedly defeated alpha female, no one would even look at me. Thing is, though, I had such little time left here at school; and I knew that when I graduated I’d most likely never even see any of these guys again. Their opinion of me didn’t shape my opinion of me anymore and so nothing they said behind my back mattered the way it used to. I stopped trying to live up to their impossible expectations and instead set clear ones for myself. Held accountable only to myself. The pack still didn’t like me. I still spent most lunch times alone, most paired projects done on my own, but I felt better about it now than I did before. Any friends I made from now on would be real friends—like Alex. Friends that accepted me as I am: a perfect wolf or a half-wolf; a chaotic, opinionated, sometimes wrong, sometimes right person; sometimes forgetting to call and sometimes being the best friend ever. Alex taught me what it meant to have a true friend, and I’d never settle again. I knew now to my core that I was worth more than that, no matter how anyone else measured my worth. And it occurred to me, as I sat alone eating lunch, that the entire ugly world I left behind was still exactly the same; the people, the teachers, the school, my home, the plainness of it all. But I had changed. Remarkably. And so I saw it all through remarkable eyes now, and I smiled to myself because it felt like I was upside-down and they were right-way-up, or maybe in reverse: it was the same world, but looked at now from a different perspective.
After school I rode straight home through the mucky remains of winter and grabbed Max, running across the community park to Alex’s back door. He never left his room, and Plain never left his study, so I didn’t expect to see either of them pass through on their way into the library—but they did.
I shut the door behind me, my eyes adjusting to the dim light, and put Max down. He started running to find Sacha before all four paws were on the ground, nosing apart the partially open door to George’s study and letting out the flood of light and the noise of the TV tuned into the news again. It almost felt like George was still here.
From the kitchen I could smell Mom’s pancakes cooking, and thought about asking her first if I should follow Alex and Plain. But this was once my world—one I didn’t have to share with anyone—so I decided for myself and opened the library door. They both looked up at me as I stepped in, and for a moment my eyes expected the usual forced daylight that flooded through the windows after Mom told Plain he wasn’t allowed to have the curtains closed in the day. He’d sit in his chair by that window and think all day. Well, we assumed he was thinking, since he did nothing but sit. But today, he was up and about, and the curtains were closed.
“Shhh,” he said to me, pressing a finger to his lips. He waved me over and I shut the door, checking the hall first to see if Mom was coming.
“What are you doing?” I asked, walking over to them.
“Look,” Alex said, and when he stood back, I saw the Worldinator. But it looked different. Instead of all the spindly arms and wires it was now a spherical device about the size of a fitball, with a flat base so it didn’t roll away, and several circular lenses all over the top. The only reason I knew it was the Worldinator was because it had been painted on the side in tacky handwriting.
Plain followed a cord to a computer screen on the floor by his leather armchair, and sat down to type something.
“Imprints,” Plain said. “I couldn’t make the Worldinator paint what it saw—that was its flaw. But copying the image from one’s mind—” he tapped his temple, “—it never did have a problem with that. And I, insightfully, took George’s images before he died.”
The machine started up with a gentle hum and lights flickered within its core.
“And then an angel came to me in my dream,” he continued, “and she told me to project it.” He laughed once, as though it was madness. “Project it.”
“So that’s what this new machine does?”
“It does,” he said, nodding. “But not like a normal projector. In fact, I got the idea for this version from the sun.”
“The sun?” I laughed.
“Yes, the sun,” he insisted.
“It... does it talk to you?” I asked, wondering about his mental state.
“Of course,” he said pragmatically. “There is wisdom in everything, if you stop long enough to listen.”
“Even in a dog poop?” Alex challenged playfully.
“Yes, and a leaf on the ground or a bird on your shoulder; from even the smallest child to the old man that’s past his expiry date,” Plain added, motioning to himself. “But what you hear is not a reflection of what they have to teach, my boy—” he wagged his finger at him, as though this was the key point, “—but of what you have to learn.”
Alex and I exchanged glances. It was nice to see Alex out of his room, looking human in a pair of jeans and death metal T-shirt. There were no Slinkys on his arm or odd phrases on his shirt, but he was still Alex, I was certain.
His eyes went past me then and a raspy breath made him cover his mouth. I looked around the room as the Worldinator spat seamless projections over the walls and the ceiling, each one from a different lens, all joining up to make one 360˚ image.
“The land of lake and sea,” I said, turning to take it all in. It was just as Alex described it: a single tree for all the birds to sit in at the middle of a lake that might be a sea, and clear blue skies.
“This was his
vision,” Plain said, standing between us, his arms over our shoulders. “This was George’s wonderful world.”
It felt like a crying moment, but there was something so supreme and so pure in the joy of seeing inside George’s head, even though he wasn’t here anymore, that it made me smile instead. I looked at Alex, and he was smiling too, his eyes lost in the wonder of another world.
“You did it, Plain!” I exclaimed. “You’re a genius.”
Plain nodded. “I did it for George.”
Alex’s brow pulled then and I saw something flicker behind his eyes, an unreadable kind of determination setting behind them, like a sunrise in a bubble.
“Alex?” I said. “Are you okay?”
“This can never happen again,” he said.
“What can’t?”
He walked away, not saying a word.
“Alex?” I called.
“Alex,” Plain tried.
Alex stopped at his father’s command.
“Son, what is it?”
“I made plans, Dad.” He turned to face us, his eyes wet. “Is it too late?”
Plain’s worried expression softened to a smile. “It’s never too late.”
Alex looked at me. “Red, can you help me?”
“Help you what?”
“Get my grades up. I gotta go to college.”
I felt the smile brighten within me, heard Alex’s voice from the past as he told me he wanted to cure brain damage, in George’s name, but I tried not to show how core-deep happy I was to hear him say that. Instead, I just nodded.
“Sure. You have a lot of catching up to do, Alex, but it’s not impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” he said, looking back at Plain, who closed his eyes and smiled as he nodded to himself.
Part Four: Chapter Five
The Strange Birds Are the Mystery Solved
All Alex and I had talked about for the past few weeks was schoolwork. Alex was set to return to school on Monday, and life would go on—both of us altered beyond our previous states—but as yet we’d not spoken about my time at the mansion. The one time I started he asked me not to. He said that if I’d been held ‘captive’, as I told him when I first came home, then he wasn’t ready to carry that weight as well as the weight of missing George. So I never even told him that I could change into wolf form now, which meant I couldn’t explain to him why both Mom and I had to go out tonight. So instead I told him we were going to catch a movie. I wondered if he wondered why we didn’t invite him. Then again, he’d have declined even if we did invite him to our fake movie date. It’s not like he ever left the house for anything these days.
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