“I was not sent to the principal’s office,” Stella replied.
“Jim—” her mother began.
“Oh, Tam—of course my little chickadee is going to help a bird.” Jim winked, and Stella felt an ache in the center of her chest. Her father liked to tease; Stella never got into trouble. She was a practical girl, and trouble didn’t seem worth the effort. But she missed her dad and the way he managed to encourage both her (who got into trouble too little) and Cole (who got into trouble too much).
“How’s it going over there?” Stella asked. “Did you get the grid sorted out?”
Jim nodded. “We managed to restore power to about half the area,” he said. “People are so relieved—it’s been out for months. Did you get the photos I sent? Me and the transformers?”
“They’re bigger than I thought they would be,” Stella said. “They always look small in the diagrams.”
“They have to be a good size to get that much power.” Her dad grinned.
“What time is it there?” Stella asked.
“It’s about one fifteen in the morning,” her dad replied. “Late. But I wanted to be the first to say happy birthday to your mom!”
“We still have until tomorrow,” Stella pointed out.
“But here, it is tomorrow. I didn’t want to get into trouble.” James put a hand up to the side of his mouth and pretended to whisper, “You know how she is.” He rolled his eyes dramatically.
Tamara smiled. “I get such a bad rap.”
“Where’s Cole?” James asked, and Cole, who had been pouring crackers into a bowl, turned from the counter to wave at the computer.
“Oh, yeah, Dad, Cole wanted to ask you . . .” Stella’s voice trailed off. “Dad?”
James continued to smile from the screen, but he didn’t move. “Oh, he’s frozen,” Renee said. She traced a light finger across the touch pad. “Can you hear us?”
The picture on the screen flickered, and Stella felt the tiny hairs all over her body tremble. She felt Cole standing behind her chair, and she remembered how he had flickered, just for that one moment. . . .
Words reached out to them in choppy blurts. “Jim, we can barely hear you,” Tamara announced into the computer.
And then—suddenly—his head shifted to the right, and the picture was back. “How’s this? Can you hear me now?”
“Yes,” the room chorused.
“Hey, Cole wanted to ask you something,” Stella said, scooting over to make room on her chair for Cole, who sat beside her.
“Yeah, I—” her brother began.
“Just a second, Cole.” Jim looked over his shoulder and nodded at someone they couldn’t see. “Yeah,” he said, then turned back to the camera. “I may have to go in a minute—”
“No problem!” Aunt Gertie chirped from the stove, where she was stirring something that smelled of spices and heat. “We want to eat!”
“Are you saving some for me?” Jim asked.
“No! We are eating your share,” Aunt Gertie sing-songed in her lilting accent.
“Okay, well, hey, Cole, I—” The words were cut off.
“He’s frozen again,” Renee said.
Tamara took the computer back. She clicked and double-clicked. “Ugh!” Then she hung up the call and tried again. There was no answer. Sighing, she said, “Well, you know how the signal is there.”
“The electricity goes out all the time,” Stella agreed. “Sorry you didn’t get to talk to him.” She smiled gently at her brother. “Or tell him about my newfound fear of jelly doughnuts.”
Cole shrugged. “Next time,” he said vaguely. He nibbled another cracker.
Stella sighed, feeling a bit guilty for hogging screen time with their father. Cole had barely even had a chance to say hi to their dad, who might not get to call again for another couple of days.
“All right, who is ready to eat?” Aunt Gertie asked.
“Mom brought a cake from that new bakery!” Renee announced.
“Renee!” Gertie hooted. “That was supposed to be a surprise! Tamara, don’t look in that box there. There’s nothing for you to see! That’s not for your birthday!”
Renee looked embarrassed, but Tamara laughed and gave her best friend a hug. Everyone knew that Renee was terrible at keeping secrets. To be fair, this was a genetic trait: Gertie was also lousy at it. They never gossiped—they just got so excited about things that they forgot when they were secret.
Stella looked over at her brother. He shoved a cracker into his mouth and crunched. He chewed and chewed as he stared near the computer screen. Not quite at it. More like over it, at the wall beyond.
“Cole! You stop eating those crackers,” Gertie ordered. “I made a pot of cachupa rice, here.”
“And I made the salad,” Renee added.
“Why don’t you wash your hands and go set the table?” Tamara took the bowl from his hands. “And Stella, you can get the water pitchers and glasses.”
“Come on, Cole.” Stella poked her brother in the arm. It took him a moment to nod and follow. It was almost as if he were receiving the signal from far away. From across the planet, maybe. Or from another galaxy.
After dinner, Cole said he had a headache, but Gertie wasn’t having it. She insisted that he help clear the table before he lurched off to his room to be alone. Stella tried to catch his eye, but he really did seem to be feeling unwell. Between that terrifying moment on the subway and losing his notebook, it didn’t seem that surprising.
He’ll probably feel better in the morning, she told herself. That’s what people always tell themselves, and it is quite often true.
Stella’s English teacher insisted that they read at least twenty minutes from an unassigned book every night, but she had just finished a nonfiction story about the race to build the atomic bomb and hadn’t yet chosen a new one. So, once Gertie and Renee gave their hugs and goodbyes—and Renee reminded Stella to dig out an unopened jar of peanut butter from the cupboard for the food drive—Stella found herself rooting around the living room shelf, looking for something to read.
Most of the books were things she had read before or had no intention of ever reading, but a volume of classic fairy tales was laid across the top edge of several tomes, sticking out slightly. This was the kind of thing that Cole often read to inspire the mythology of Lyrrin. They weren’t the cleaned-up Disney Princess versions—they were the originals, with people who were forced to dance themselves to death in hot iron shoes and whatnot. People in old-fashioned fairy tales had a lot of anger issues.
This wasn’t the type of thing that Stella usually liked, but today—perhaps because Cole had lost his notebook or perhaps because she had to read something and nothing else struck her—she picked it up. She flipped through the pages and came to a beautiful illustration of Hansel and Gretel in front of a house made of gingerbread. It was a story that had always bothered her. After all, the parents had barely enough to eat. That was why they led the children into the woods and left them there. It was awful, but maybe it made a selfish sort of sense. Who could bear to watch their children starve? It was all pretty complicated when you really stopped to think about it.
She snapped shut the book with a soft thump and brought it to her room. Cole’s bedroom was beside hers and his door was shut. No light leaked out beneath the door. That’s good, she thought. He’s asleep. Her heart gave a little flutter at the thought of the secret she was keeping from her mother. But what would be the point of telling her parents about what had happened on the train? They would just worry and punish Cole. Besides, he wasn’t likely to do anything like that ever again. He didn’t need punishment. He needed rest.
Stella brushed her teeth and changed into her favorite pajamas and then tucked herself into bed to read. Her mother was back at the kitchen table, working on her computer, answering macroeconomics questions. She was studying for a master’s degree, and nothing—not even a birthday—kept her from her homework.
Stella found, to her surprise, t
hat she enjoyed reading the familiar fairy tales. They felt easy on her mind, like a well-worn path through the woods. They lifted the heavy feeling in her stomach, the stone of not telling her mother what had happened in the subway. It was also fun to read an illustrated book. Stella had reached an age where most of the books she read were text only, which was fine in the way that her dreary school building was fine. She did not object, and even found some comfort in it.
But neither did she object to the illustrations. They were beautiful, and the lovely details—the tiny red mushrooms with white polka dots tucked halfway beneath a fern in the corner of the forest, for example—captured her imagination, making it easy to slip away to another place.
At nine o’clock, Stella’s mother appeared in the doorway. Stella closed her book and folded her legs under the comforter as her mother came to sit near her feet. She pulled a purple marker from the cup on the desk and handed it to Stella. They both looked over at the calendar on the wall, and neither said a word as Stella marked through the white square that indicated the date with a slash. There were fourteen white squares left in the month.
“Soon,” her mother said, but Stella was thinking about fairy land and how time stretched and changed there. What was the difference between fourteen days and eternity? They were both in the future—you couldn’t touch either one. Neither one of them was now.
“Why do you think the Skype cut out?” Stella asked.
Her mother touched Stella’s hair gently. “You know why. It happens. He’ll call when he can.”
“What if something bad happened?”
“Nothing bad happened.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“But how do you know?”
Her mother leaned her head back against the wall. She closed her eyes for a moment. “If something bad happens, they’ll call us,” she said, “or they’ll send someone over,” and then Stella regretted asking. Her mother was right—the military always contacted the families first. She turned to Stella. “I’m supposed to say something to you about getting a detention.”
“That really won’t happen again,” Stella promised. “It was just that this bird is—”
“Honestly, Stella, it’s fine,” her mother said. “I understand why the teacher was angry, but—you broke a rule, you got punished, end of story. If it happens again, we’ll really talk. I just wanted to feel that I had done my motherly duty by mentioning—it—” Her voice cut off into a yawn.
Stella nodded.
Lola, Stella’s long-haired black cat, came strutting in and flopped onto the rug in the center of the room with her paws in the air.
“I swear that cat is part dog,” Mom said, stooping to pet Lola on the belly. Clearly insulted, Lola grabbed at her with her paws and playfully bit at her hand. Then she rolled over, stood up, and stared at Stella’s closet, swishing her bushy tail.
“Crazy cat.”
“You hurt her feelings,” Stella said.
“I can’t worry about a cat’s feelings,” her mother replied. “She’ll live.” Bending over, she gave Stella a warm kiss on the forehead.
Her mother stretched out beside her and let out a yawn. Stella turned out the light on her bedside table. Her room was never entirely dark. Stella would have preferred darkness, but in the city, light leaked through the curtains, casting strange shadows in her room. In total darkness, there were no shadows.
Even in the dim light, Lola continued to stare at the closet in the unnerving way that cats have. Stella tried to ignore it. She snuggled closer to her mother, who was breathing deeply and evenly. There wasn’t much point in waking her up to tell her to go to sleep.
The moment Stella shut her eyes, she heard it—a scratching sound from the closet. Her eyes snapped open.
A sweaty chill raced from Stella’s scalp to her toes, but she didn’t get out of bed. She told herself that she had imagined it. But the steady swish of Lola’s tail said otherwise. The cat turned her yellow eyes to Stella.
Stella pressed more closely against her mother. The noise did not happen again. Lola walked to the closet door and tried to stick her paw underneath it. Eventually, she gave up on whatever she had imagined was there and hopped onto Stella’s bed. Lazily, she turned in a circle—once, twice—and then lay down into a tidy Cat Donut.
The room was quiet except for the sound of her mother’s breathing. There was a warm body at Stella’s side and one atop her toes. She should have dropped off instantly. But although she was tired, her mind was busy clicking and buzzing with thoughts about Cole, and the subway train, and her father. After a reasonable amount of time of counting sheep (she pictured them in a herd, grazing quietly) she decided to open a window. She slipped her feet into a pair of flip-flops, clicked on her bedside lamp, and let in some air. Then she settled back on top of her covers with her book of fairy tales.
The temperamental spring weather had dried out and served up a warm evening. Someone was playing music, and a sad, unfamiliar guitar strain slipped in through the small opening between the sash and the sill. Outside, beyond the glass, the moon shimmered like an opal. Stella had read that, in the seventeenth century, an Italian astronomer named Riccioli had mapped the oceans on the moon. You can see the pattern of the dark waters when you look up.
There is only one problem—there aren’t any oceans on the moon. The “seas” are actually ancient lava beds. They’re made of rock.
But Stella had always loved thinking about Riccioli and his imaginary oceans. Sometimes, she even thought she could see them churn and roil on the silver disk.
She looked down at the book of fairy tales. She had been reading “The White Cat,” which was a lot like “Beauty and the Beast.” Except in “Beauty and the Beast,” the heroine saves the prince with a kiss. In “The White Cat,” she saves him by cutting off his head and tail and throwing them into the fire. Also, instead of singing and dancing candelabras and teacups, the servants were floating, disembodied arms.
A tree branch tapped, tapped, tapped against her window, and Stella shuddered a little, thinking of the drumming of delicate white fingers at the end of bodiless arms. She tried to peer through the glass, but the small puddle of light cast by her bedside lamp made it impossible to see out. Instead, she found herself blinking at her own reflection as the strange music chimed on.
Then a small thump came from beneath her bed, sending a shock of fear through her nerve endings. She had just convinced herself that she had imagined it when there was another thunk, and then a yelp. “Ouch!”
If there is one thing that is worse than the feeling that there might be something underneath the bed, it is the absolute certainty that there is something underneath the bed.
Something that can talk.
Very, very slowly, she leaned over the edge of her mattress. With her left hand, she reached down and pulled up the dust ruffle. Two tiny eyes gleamed at her and she swallowed a scream. The monster darted out from beneath the bed and Lola pounced at it.
“Lola!” Stella cried.
The cat had streaked toward the door. She shot an accusing glare back at Stella, who realized that Lola had something in her mouth. It was silvery gray.
“You’ll choke,” Stella said, striding toward the cat. Lola took a tentative sideways step. “Drop it!”
The cat deposited a small mouse at her feet. Then she tucked her tail around her paws and looked up at Stella, as if expecting congratulations.
Stella looked down at the mouse, which was perfectly still. A small pouch hung from a string around its neck, and the mouse seemed to have dropped something. . . . A scrap of paper. Picking it up, she realized—it was a piece torn from Cole’s notebook, the one he had lost on the train that afternoon.
What kind of mouse steals a scrap from a notebook and then follows its owner home? She looked at the creature more carefully. It was larger than a normal mouse, and his fur seemed to cast a luminous glow. It seemed unreal, but as she bent to touch it, it squeaked
. It looked at her, blinking, then grabbed the paper and darted toward the wall.
“Hey! Give that back!”
Stella lunged after it as the mouse ran headlong into the plaster. Tripping forward, she had just managed to grab the mouse by the tail as she fell against the wall—and kept going right through it.
The Middle of Nowhere
THE DISTANCE SHE FELL WAS no more than the distance to the floor, but she could tell by her soft landing that this was not her carpet. She was facedown in something that felt like wood chips. Stella sat up and brushed herself off, but when she opened her eyes, the whiteness of the sky and the wavy black horizon blinded her. She put her hands over her eyes for a moment. Heat pulsed down against her scalp. Wincing, she tried to open her lids just a slit. The sky was white, the ground was black, and the brilliance clawed at her vision. She shut them again, heart thumping and clanging.
She tried again, more slowly, and with lots of blinking. After a few moments, things came into focus. The sky was a washed-out, pale blue, almost white at the edges. The ground around her was black, except for the small bit she was sitting on. That was a mound of woodchips which seemed to serve a few very sad-looking mums placed here and there. It was a median. She was seated on a median in a vast, empty parking lot. Music floated on the still air. It was a blandly cheerful tune that Stella felt certain she had heard before over the speakers at her doctor’s office, and it had a tinny quality, as if it were being played on a toy saxophone.
A line of large buildings built in faux-Spanish hacienda style hulked nearby. It was . . . a strip mall. Stella read the names of the stores: Impulse, Harmless Fancy, and one called Momentary Fascinator. The buildings were set back at the center, where there was a large fountain featuring a bulging-eyed fish sculpture spouting a column of water.
Beside the fountain was a double door, like the kind on an elevator, set beside a Metro sign and a down escalator. And there, not ten yards away, something small and silver scurried away from her. The mouse!
“Come back!” Stella shouted, racing after it.
The Dreamway Page 3
