I nodded, wanting desperately to believe that Brady’s logic made sense, that this wasn’t just wishful thinking. “Okay.”
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Brady said.
“What’s that?”
“Piper never came back to town. She would have called me. But that woman Sage said she went into DW.”
“Right.”
“How? When? Is there another portal we don’t know about?”
“She probably went in down by the lake,” I said, opening up my suitcase, which someone had left at the foot of the bed.
“What?”
I stopped in my tracks. I had no idea why I had said that, but I suddenly knew beyond a doubt that there was a lake down a path behind the hotel, and that somewhere down there was a portal. I looked up at Brady. “Come with me.”
We snuck out of our room, glad that Sage and John didn’t seem to be anywhere around, and then tiptoed downstairs, through the lobby, and into that run-down courtyard with the broken lawn furniture. I looked around, having the craziest déjà vu of my life. Images of the hotel, the smell of the burned coffee, the way the light danced into Sage and John’s apartment—I felt like I was remembering it from a million years ago. The trees and vegetation were completely overgrown behind the building, but somehow it seemed that if I could pull away a couple of branches . . .
I climbed over some weeds and parted the very tall cattails blocking my path, my feet getting muddy in the swamp-like water. Brady followed behind me, not speaking. A few steps more revealed that there was indeed a path winding its way down into the woods. I stared at it in disbelief.
“How did you know?” Brady asked.
“Brady, I think I’ve been here before.” I turned and looked over his head at the top of the hotel, poking up above the high branches. At the highest windows, I could make out the billowy white curtains of Sage and John’s apartment. I thought of the red painted bathroom, the little coffee table by the window. The apartment of my dreams.
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I didn’t remember,” I insisted. “It was so long ago. But I know I’ve been here. I’ve been in that apartment. And down this path . . .” I turned to look down the windy pathway, which widened and firmed up a bit as it went along. “There’s a lake.”
We walked in step with each other, side by side. It took about fifteen minutes to make our way down the gentle slope of the hillside, winding ever deeper into the darkening woods. I knew making our way back would be difficult, as it would be completely black by then. But I didn’t want to wait until morning.
We reached the lake as the sun was setting behind it in a brilliant puddle of orange and red. An evening breeze was picking up, offering some relief from the sticky heat of summer, and even though I was sure we’d be eaten alive by mosquitoes, I didn’t care. It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight, oddly familiar. I turned to my left, looking for the boathouse that I was sure I would find. But it wasn’t there.
“Look for a boathouse,” I instructed Brady, and we both scanned the horizon in different directions.
“There.” Brady pointed to our right.
We walked the couple hundred feet down the shore of the lake to the little hut, discovering that its one little door was padlocked shut.
“If only we knew how to pick locks,” I said.
“I do,” Brady responded, reaching for a stone near our feet. He picked it up and pushed me behind him a bit. Before I could protest, he hurled the stone through the window, and the glass smashed with a resounding echo.
“Are you crazy?”
“Did you want to go ask your old friends at the hotel for a key?”
Brady cleared the remaining glass shards with his shoe, then knelt down and cupped his hands to boost me up.
“Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I never said I was a saint.”
“Oh, I already figured that out,” I said, stepping up into his hand and climbing gently through the windowpane, landing with a thud on the other side. I turned to help him climb through after me.
It was a tiny little hut, full of bait cans and fishing tackle. And against one wall was what appeared to be a metal scaffold covered with a large white tarp.
I took a deep breath. Brady seemed to sense my apprehension, and he stepped forward, pulling the tarp down over the frame so it landed near our feet. Underneath, there were three stacked fishing boats. There didn’t seem to be anything odd about it.
I stood and shook my head. We were missing something. I looked up and down, searching the tiny one-room structure. I crouched down and looked under the scaffolding frame, but there was nothing but a concrete floor below it.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Brady. “I could have sworn.”
“Do you remember anything else from when you were little?”
“I don’t know.” I searched my brain, trying to elicit memories that had been buried for so long. “There were other people. Adults. And I was with my mother.” I walked over to the broken window and stood, staring out at the melting sunset beyond the tranquil water.
Brady came and stood beside me. “It’s pretty, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. The water was growing dark as the sun sank lower. And it looked at once so familiar and so new. My mind was racing in circles, and I couldn’t seem to nail it down. But then a thought occurred to me.
“What did Sage say?” I asked. “You drop a stone into a lake . . . an infinite lake . . .”
“Yeah?”
“They were swimming,” I remembered, my head swirling with images. My mother by my side. She was in a white bathing suit. She was worried. And she said something, something that had stuck with me over the years, but I could never place where I had heard it. “They won’t come out.”
“Who won’t?”
“That’s what my mother said. She said, ‘They won’t come out.’ They were swimming in the lake.”
That seemed to be all the information Brady needed. The next thing I knew, he was leaping out of the window. He ran over to the lake and peered into the darkening waters. “Come on!”
I watched as he kicked off his shoes and took off his T-shirt.
“Are you serious?”
“You want to know, don’t you?” he shouted, already making his way into the water.
I had to find a trash can to turn over and place by the window so I could climb back out, and by the time I reached the shore, Brady had already dived in, wearing nothing but his shorts. I stood there frozen. Sure, a guy could go swimming in his shorts. They’re basically swim trunks. What’s the difference? But what was I supposed to wear?
Brady’s head disappeared under the water for a moment, long enough that my mind began to turn to dark thoughts of him not coming back up. I raced closer to where the water lapped the gravel, my shoes getting wet, looking for him. He popped up maybe twenty feet away and waved me in.
“You have to see this,” he said, before gulping down a huge breath and going under again. He was gone before I could even ask him what he’d seen.
“Fine,” I said to myself, quickly pulling off my Keds and jeans. I threw my clothes away from the water and ran in, diving headfirst when I felt the water reach my thighs.
It was exhilarating. In the humidity of summer, I had spent the day covered in a film of sweat. But with the cool water surrounding me, I finally felt a bit of relief.
I swam over to where I had seen Brady’s head pop up and looked around for him. I took a deep gulp, preparing to go down and look for him, when he sprang up right next to me.
“Gotcha!” he shouted, quickly tickling my sides and pulling away before I could catch him.
I couldn’t help but squeal when he did it. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” he laughed, though he clear
ly wasn’t. Brady never seemed to stay in one mood for too long. Even today, with the stress of being here, with the knowledge that Piper was still in DW somewhere, he found reasons to laugh. I realized that maybe the reason I had fallen so hard for him was because everyone else I knew seemed to drag invisible chains behind them at all times. While Brady did a couple of backflips in the water, I thought of Kieren and his sad eyes, of my mother and her secrets.
“What did you find?” I asked as he swam around me.
“I don’t know. Some sort of box. You ready?”
I nodded.
“Take a deep breath,” he instructed, and I did as I was told. He did the same, and we both dove down as far as we could.
Beneath our feet at the lake floor was indeed a wooden box, barely visible in the fading light. I paddled against the water with all my might to reach it, grabbing on to the edge of it in order to secure myself once down there. Brady had beat me there by a second, and he held up a finger and then pointed to a handle on the top of the box. He grabbed it and yanked. The lid came up. The inside was so dark that I couldn’t make anything out, but Brady took his hand and reached in anyway. Right before I ran out of breath and had to go back up, I saw a split second of telltale bright light. It was a portal.
I shot back up through the water, my head bursting through the surface, and gulped in a deep breath. My heart was racing. How on earth did a portal get out here? Did they build it? How? And my next thought, of course, was that if they’d split an atom in this lake, then the whole thing was probably radioactive. Were we both going to get cancer swimming in it?
Brady appeared next to me, but it was getting so dark, he was just a silhouette against the horizon.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But it’s there.”
We bobbed in the water for a bit, inching our way closer together so we could make out each other’s faces. The singing of the crickets was echoing in my ears, and tiny little water bugs were dancing on the surface around us. I knew we needed to go in, but at the same time, I wanted to stay here with Brady forever.
“At least now we know how she went in,” I offered.
He nodded, staring at me.
“Should we follow her?”
Brady looked around a bit, as if taking in the light. “Not tonight,” he decided. “It’s late. And you haven’t eaten anything. Let’s do it tomorrow, okay?”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure he could even make out my head in this light. “Yes.”
Without even thinking about it, I leaned over and kissed him, our legs bumping into each other as we paddled in the dark water. Brady put his hand on my face, but I couldn’t tell if he meant to pull me in or push me away. It was almost like his hand needed to touch me to be sure that I existed. I pulled back a bit and searched his expression for some reaction, good or bad. But in the sinking light, all I saw was my own reflection in his deep brown eyes.
“We should get in,” was all he said.
Humiliation rushed over me. So he was just being polite after all. He didn’t want me. I had concocted this whole connection in my head, and now I had made a complete fool of myself. I swam away as quickly as I could and raced up onto the shore, grabbing my jeans and my shoes.
I walked quickly down the path, still in my underwear, though it was so dark I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me. I stepped into my pants once my legs were dry enough and threw on my shoes, all by feel alone. There didn’t seem to be any moon tonight, and I started cursing myself for the stupidity of starting out on this expedition so late. Somewhere in the gulf behind me I could hear Brady calling out for me to wait for him, but I couldn’t.
It occurred to me after a bit that he was intentionally staying several feet behind me on the walk back, like a parent following a hysterical child who needed some time to cool down. There was something so condescendingly protective about it that I couldn’t help but hate him for it. I wanted to run away from this whole thing so badly, but for the first time in my life, I felt I no longer had the dream apartment to fantasize about. Realizing that all this time, my fantasy had been nothing but a fading memory of Sage’s place, something I must have seen once as a child, somehow corrupted it. It was like it had been stolen from me, along with my mother and my brother and the million other things I had lost since.
I hated Sage, her sweetly kind voice talking down to me like I was a wounded bird she’d found in the street. And now Brady was treating me the same way. I didn’t need Brady, I didn’t need Sage, and I hated that stupid hotel with its never-ending stench of burned coffee.
I was crying, of course. I was crying out of frustration as I walked. And I desperately didn’t want Brady to hear it and feel even sorrier for me.
Somewhere from that stupid safe distance behind me, I heard Brady call my name one more time. It was like hearing a gun go off. I ran with all my might the rest of the way, tripping several times on hidden rocks and branches, each time catching myself at the last minute before I fell. I didn’t stop running until I was back in the lobby of the hotel, running past Sage, who was knitting on an old musty chair and clearly waiting for us. I sprinted up the stairs and into the room where I had been sleeping before, and I slammed the door behind me.
I was coming out of the shower a bit later that night, after I had calmed down and my anger had been replaced by waves of embarrassment coming back to taunt me every few minutes.
To drown it out, I turned on the old TV, which I quickly discovered only got two channels, both of which were obscured by static and wavy lines. I turned it off and thought of emailing my dad, but the only internet around here seemed to be on Brady’s phone. This was completely hopeless.
I heard a knock on the door and I ignored it. It was a gentle knock, almost too polite. It was like even the knock was condescending to me.
“I’m sleeping,” I finally said, hoping that would be the end of it.
“I brought you a sandwich,” came Sage’s sweet and light voice. “Should I leave the tray?”
I sighed. There was really no excuse to be so rude to Sage. She had been trying to help us since we got here. She was letting us stay in these empty hotel rooms for free. And I was, I had to admit, completely starving.
I got up and opened the door as slightly as possible, mortified that Brady might be there. When I saw that he wasn’t, I quickly let her in and closed the door behind her.
Sage came and sat on the edge of my bed while I devoured the sandwich and the two little cookies that she had placed next to it.
“When I was your age,” she began, though I was only half listening to her as I chewed, “I had the biggest crush on John. Oh my God, I was in love with him.”
I looked at her, certain my cheeks were turning red. Great, so she knew. Did Brady tell her, or had she guessed?
“He thought of me as just a friend, of course. He only had eyes for one girl.”
“Yeah, who was that?” I asked, sounding snarkier than I had intended.
Sage smiled at me, a question appearing in her eyes. “Your mother, of course. You didn’t know?”
I gulped down a bit of sandwich and took a long drink of water. I shook my head. “Obviously, I don’t know anything about her. Do I?”
Sage nodded and bowed her head for a moment, almost as if to give me some space. “What do you want to know?”
“She brought me here, didn’t she? I’ve been here before.”
Sage nodded. “I think you were four. Your brother didn’t come—he stayed with your father. It was just a short visit.”
“Nothing is just anything with you people. Why did she really come?”
“You’re a quick one. I’m gonna have to watch out for you!”
“Tell me, then.”
“Okay,” she said, almost to herself. “Okay.”
She stood up and paced for a bit.
“So twenty years ago, when we were your age, your mother and John discovered the first portals. The ones under the school. Your mother was the real genius of the operation. She experimented with every portal. She’s the one who realized that the three doors under the old science lab all had different properties. That one seemed to go to an alternate plane of the past, and another of the present, and the third of the future. And so she made the signs. She was obsessed with trying to control it. To figure out how to go to a specific time and place, not just end up somewhere random.”
“And?”
“She couldn’t figure it out. We tried stepping in the exact same place as the time before, concentrating on where we wanted to end up. Nothing worked, though. So it became part of the game. Which plane will we end up in this time? We all followed John and your mother because they were the popular couple, and we all wanted to be wherever they were. All of us. Jenny and Dave first. And then George. George probably would have followed me anywhere. I know that now.”
“Who’s George?”
“Oh, you met him. In the diner when I first saw you. Remember?”
I nodded, remembering the man in the white clothes who waited by the counter when Sage came over to our table. And I remembered the distant look in his eyes, like he had just woken up from a deep sleep.
“We were able to keep the secret for quite a while, more than a year. We developed rituals around it. Out on the old grounds—there were these old carnival grounds that had been built in the forties for military kids. Fun houses and swings. It was all made to look like a little Nordic village. By the nineties, when we were teenagers, it wasn’t used for much. The company that had run it went out of business and the town used it on occasion for holidays. At night it was empty.
“We would go there before going down into the portals, late at night, and we would hold a little ceremony, blessing our journey.”
I smiled, trying to imagine my mother as a part of that group, how beautiful she must have been then.
“I know it probably sounds strange to you, that we were on our own so much. You have to understand, things were very different then. No one locked their doors. Kids were expected to take care of themselves quite a bit.”
Down World Page 13
