Piper put her fork down, and I saw her flinch. “You know Brady?” she asked quietly.
“He’s . . . ,” I began, hesitating for a moment over the word. “He’s my friend.” I glanced at Robbie, who didn’t seem fazed by the mention of anyone named Brady, and I couldn’t help but add, “He really loves you.”
She nodded. “How is he?” she asked, sincerely concerned.
“He’s worried about you. We went to see the Mystics, Piper. And we went into the portal under the lake.”
“Oh God,” she said. “I was afraid he might do something like that. Didn’t I say he might do that, Robbie?”
“You did,” he agreed, biting into an apple. I got the feeling he had heard this story before and wasn’t really interested in it.
“Is he back home now?”
“No, Piper,” I said, trying to be gentle since she at least seemed to be genuinely worried about him. “He stayed down in the world under the lake. He took the train home from there to find you. Since that’s what we heard you had done.”
“He’s still down there?” she asked, a film of horror covering her face. “Oh God, of course. You have to believe me, I really was going to stay in that dimension. I was going home.”
“I believe you.”
“I had no idea I’d end up . . . wherever we are. On this train. Not really anywhere, I guess.” A new thought jostled her almost out of her seat. “Was Brady okay when you saw him?”
“He’s fine. He promised he wouldn’t stay more than a couple of days. I’m sure when he didn’t find you, he came straight home. He’s probably back by now.”
“But did he have his shot?”
“We both . . . ,” I began, remembering that our vaccine pellets had been removed. “We both got the shot, but then I had a bad reaction to it. So Sage took them out.”
Piper sighed, slumping down on the bed. “What if he gets the disease now?”
Robbie, seeing that Piper was upset, finally seemed stirred by this conversation and went to sit next to her on the bed. “He’ll be fine,” he whispered to her.
“Piper?” I said, growing annoyed with my brother’s affection for this girl and his complete ignoring of me. “Can you tell me what happened, please?”
“Well, I guess I need to start from the beginning, huh?” she asked. “Yeah, that’s the only way the story makes any sense.”
I nodded.
“I hadn’t really thought it out, you know. I’m sure Brady told you what I did—that I took my parents out of DW and brought them into our world. I snuck them out in the middle of the night, I couldn’t explain to them why. That on another plane they had been in an accident, a horrible accident.”
“Were you there when it happened?” I asked.
She nodded. “My dad had taken us camping. One more time before summer’s over, he had said. He liked to surprise us with things like that. We were driving late at night, way up in the mountains. It was dark and . . .”
Robbie scooched even closer to her, so their thighs were touching. She reached down, almost instinctively, and put her hand on his leg as though it was her own.
“The car came out of nowhere. He crossed over the dividing line, into our lane. I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something. Next thing I knew, our car was flipping over and over. Again and again.”
A single tear fell down her cheek. Robbie looked away, like it was too much for him to hear the pain in her voice.
“When it stopped, we were upright again. I had been in the back seat, which hadn’t really been crushed. But the front seat . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me, Piper. I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you live through it again.”
But my words slid right over her head like they were made of air.
“My mother always had the most beautiful legs. Like a dancer’s. They were crushed. She looked like she was asleep. My father’s neck was bent at a weird angle. I crawled out of the window. I didn’t have my cell phone. That was one of Dad’s rules for camping. I thought I could find a car, call for help.”
“Baby . . .” Robbie nestled his nose into her neck, like he was trying to give her his warmth.
“I had made it back up to the road before the car exploded behind me. I had never felt heat like that before. It knocked me over.” Piper cleared her throat, trying to breathe away all the horrible memories.
“I’m so sorry, Piper. I can’t even imagine.”
“I hitched a ride in a station wagon. A mom driving her two kids somewhere, with me sandwiched in between. She didn’t ask why I had been crying, why I was so dirty. Guess she figured it was none of her business. I was halfway back to town when I decided what to do.”
I nodded for her to continue, my heart breaking for her.
“I realized that no one in town knew they were dead. The police might find the car eventually, but we were in the middle of nowhere. The car might not be found for years. No one else at home knew. What if I kept it that way? If my parents were back at home in the morning, nobody would know the difference.”
I looked to Robbie to see how he was taking all this, but he’d clearly heard it before. His eyes were glassy and vague, focused somewhere on the floor.
“I snuck into the school through a back door we had made a key to last year. I went through the portal, and the whole time I was thinking: What if they’re dead there too? What if this doesn’t work? I was really prepared to come home empty-handed. But then I got to our house on the other side, and I found them sleeping peacefully in their beds. I woke them up and told them they had to come with me, that it was an emergency.”
“They believed you?” I asked, thinking that in the middle of the night, my parents would have probably just told me to go back to bed and leave them alone.
“No, not at all.” She laughed. “At first, they thought I had made a mess in the kitchen or something. They finally agreed to follow me downstairs. Then I told them the problem wasn’t at home, it was at the school. After more fighting, I convinced them to walk with me towards the school. My mother was angry at me,” she said with a chuckle, but there was a bitter sadness behind it. “And my father was too tired to argue, which is how you know when he’s really mad.”
Robbie’s eyes were still fixed on the floor, though he appeared to be listening in his own way.
“Finally I got them to the school and down into the boiler room. The whole time they kept asking, ‘Piper, what are we doing? What is this?’ They finally said they wouldn’t follow me another step. So I told them about the accident, that in another dimension somewhere they were dead. I told them everything about DW. They didn’t believe me, of course, until they were through the door. Nobody ever believes it until they’re through the door.
“Once we had crossed over, we walked the few blocks back home in silence. The whole time I kept praying they wouldn’t ask any more questions that might make them decide to turn around and go back. Thankfully, they didn’t. Maybe they were just too tired. Maybe they thought I was having some teenage drama that they didn’t understand. For whatever reason, they let it lie. We all went to bed, and in the morning we acted like it was just another day.”
She shook her head to get the tears out of her eyes, and let out a bit of a giggle, which I had begun to realize was a nervous habit.
“And it was,” she continued. “It was a new and beautiful day. Until it wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“After a few months, things started to shift. Things around me. The trees. The sidewalk.”
“They disappeared?” I asked her, remembering what Brady had told me.
“One day the whole house wasn’t a house. It was—it’s hard to explain. It was like a military barracks or something. There were soldiers in it, sitting around a big table eating breakfast. I screamed at them, ‘Get out of my house!’
But they just stared at me, and then . . . and then they weren’t soldiers. They were my parents. Eating at our table. Staring at me. And it was my house again, just like that.”
I took a deep breath and looked out the window for a moment. A field was passing outside, the long grains of wheat blending into a seamless flurry of yellow, zipping by too quickly to take form.
“I knew I had to fix it,” Piper concluded. “I had to make it right. And I knew the way to do it was to put them back, of course—to take them back through the portal. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“So I went to the Mystics to see if they could help. I liked them. I liked Sage a lot, she was so warm. But they couldn’t help me. They told me that my parents had to go back, that I had thrown off the balance of energy between the planes. And that my parents belonged in DW . . . with their own daughter.
“It was the first time I had thought about it. That somewhere there was another version of me, sitting around with no parents. I called my DW parents and told them the truth: I wasn’t their real daughter. They had another daughter waiting for them on the other side, and they should go back to her. They shouldn’t wait for me. After I hung up, I was going to come home myself, to that empty house.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I overheard Sage and John talking about the portal under the lake. About trying to keep me away from it. And of course, like a fly to honey, I had to see for myself.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Isn’t that right, baby? I’m always getting myself into trouble.”
“Always,” Robbie agreed, smiling at her with a newfound attention. “It’s how you got here,” he joked, and they both laughed.
“I had this idea that maybe I could go visit DW sometimes. That my other self and I—maybe we could share those parents. Take turns, maybe. I know it was stupid. I just wasn’t ready to say good-bye.”
I nodded, and my eyes flitted to Robbie.
“So I went to the lake and found that portal under the water. Isn’t it terrible under there? So depressing, all those Russians. The folks at Sage’s diner told me I had to go back through the lake immediately. And I was going to. But the idea—the idea that our town was awful, like that place. That we were suffering. I don’t know, I just had to see. Like, maybe there was something I could do. Maybe that was the reason for the whole trip, even. I never felt like I had a purpose before. Suddenly I did—what if I could help people? What if I could save our whole town somehow?”
Robbie sat and listened, his eyes still haunted with a distance that kept him somewhere far away from me.
“Okay,” I said. “So how did you end up on this train with Robbie?”
“I went to the station in the world with the Russians,” she began, “like I said I would. Sage had loaned me some money for a ticket. A train came. And when the door opened, I handed the ticket to the conductor and got on.”
“And?” I asked. “Was it the wrong train?”
She smiled and shrugged. “It was this train. Once I was on, the conductor was nowhere to be found. I walked through the cars until I reached the front. And that’s when I met your brother.”
My mind was spinning. “You just got on?”
“Yes,” she said. “Your brother was sitting right here, where I am now, working on some little thing.” She smiled, like she was telling an adorable story about a toddler she used to babysit for. She continued to talk about him like he wasn’t even there, which he might as well not have been. He had tuned us out completely and was staring out the window. “He had a bunch of wires laid out in front of him. You took them out of the lamps, didn’t you, baby? And he was connecting them together with a bunch of circuits from the train engine. Like he was making a little computer or something.”
“A motherboard,” I said. “Is that it, Robbie?” I thought of the long hours we’d spent helping our father in his workshop.
“He’s always doing stuff like that,” she said fondly. “Has he always been so smart?”
I stood up and looked out the window at the passing landscape, which was now a deeply wooded area, growing dark as the long day had finally come to a close. If what Piper was saying was true, it meant getting hit wasn’t the only way onto this train. And so maybe it wasn’t the only way off it either.
“It was a coincidence,” Robbie finally said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“This train, the one we’re on, it goes between all the dimensions and stops for a bit wherever it happens to be. It doesn’t stay long. Piper just happened to be in the wrong station at the wrong time.”
“It was the right station,” Piper corrected him, a warm crinkle forming on the side of her eyes as she smiled at him. “At the right time.”
“So the train does stop,” I realized out loud.
“Yes,” she said. “But we never know when, and we never know for how long. So we’re always afraid to go too far. We don’t want to get stranded somewhere. That’s why we have such a random assortment of food,” she said with a chuckle. “We grab whatever is nearby, or in the station where we’ve stopped, and then jump back on.”
“And the conductor?” I asked. “Can you ask him where we’re going?”
“Can I tell you something scary?” she asked, and I had to laugh. As though this whole thing didn’t already count as “something scary.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think there is a conductor,” she told me. “We never see him, except when the train is about to leave the stations. He peeks out his head and shouts, ‘All aboard,’ and when we get back on, he’s just gone. It’s like he’s a ghost or something.”
I thought about this, trying to figure out where this train fit into the intersecting mesh of planes and dimensions that Sage had told me about. And trying to figure out who the conductor in charge of it might be.
That night, I caught Robbie up on everything that had happened since he’d left, including the fact that Mom had disappeared and Dad was in some sort of detainment center. I didn’t want to worry him, but I didn’t want to lie to him either.
After a while, he said he was too tired to keep talking. Piper insisted on giving me their bed, and went next door to share the couch with Robbie.
The night passed slowly, trickling by as the chugging sound of the train kept a steady beat, both in and out of my dreams. I woke up several times to look through the rear window into the other car, just to make sure Robbie was still there.
At last, I fell into a deep sleep, making a cocoon out of the sheets like I used to do at home. I was on another planet when a sound woke me—or rather, the absence of sound. It took me a minute to realize what was wrong, and then finally it occurred to me. The train had stopped.
I whipped my head out from under the blankets to find that the sun had come up. Birds were singing in a nearby tree. Piper and Robbie came back into the car before I even had a chance to take stock of what was outside the windows.
“It’s happening,” Piper said.
“Do you want to wait here?” Robbie asked me. “We might not have much time.”
“What’s happening? Where are we?” I asked, still rubbing sleep out of my eyes.
“We’re at a station,” Robbie explained. “We have to try to grab some food while we can.”
“It’s like I told you,” Piper added, clearly excited.
I nodded, everything coming back to me now that I was really awake. “I’m coming,” I said, quickly pulling on my shoes. There was no way I was staying on this train, knowing that there was a chance Robbie might not come back in time.
We walked through the door and out onto the little metal platforms that divided the cars, and Robbie unhooked the chain that dangled along the side so we could hop off.
“Won’t it look suspicious?” I asked. “If we hop off the train like this?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Piper aske
d, jumping off after Robbie and then waiting for me to do the same. “They usually can’t see us.”
“How do you think we take the food?” Robbie asked, turning to me with a comforting smile. It was the old smile that I remembered, probably the first time he had really looked like himself to me. “Don’t worry, M. Nothing bad will happen.”
I nodded, believing him as I always had, and followed them into the station.
Sure enough, nobody seemed to notice we were there. We walked right in, past a crowd of bustling passengers, the signs overhead listing dozens of different destinations. I didn’t recognize any of them, except for San Francisco and Alberta.
We walked over to the food kiosks, of which there were several, and I tried to follow Piper and Robbie’s lead of acting casual while eyeing the potential assortments of fruit, snack bars, and gum offered up in baskets in front of the ordering counters. Of course, the act didn’t really seem necessary, as even more people were walking by us without seeming to see us. But I could see them, and what I noticed most of all made me do a double take.
They were all dressed like it was the ’50s, just like under the lake portal. So was this another plane like that one had been, where some sort of retro style was in vogue? Or was it actually the ’50s here? Or maybe . . . was it possible that this was the same plane as the one under the lake? And if so, could we get home from here?
A rush of adrenaline filled my veins. Could it be that simple? But before I suggested it, I had to be sure it was the same place.
I tried to listen to the conversations of passersby, to see if they were speaking Russian. I heard several languages being spoken, but mostly English. In that way, it seemed like any train station in the country, and I couldn’t be sure. I needed to find a newspaper. Maybe something in it could tip me off as to where we were.
“So I’ll meet you right back here,” Robbie said to Piper. “Keep her close, okay?”
“Of course, baby,” Piper said, giving him a little kiss. “Come on,” she said to me.
“Where are we going?”
“To use the facilities,” she answered, and I must have looked confused, wondering if that was code for something. “The little girls’ room,” she explained, motioning to a nearby sign hanging over a door that said WOMEN.
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