Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  When did his parents divorce? Did his mom live nearby? What kind of a friend had I been for him, not even knowing these basic things about his life?

  “I didn’t know,” was all I said, talking to Kieren. “I’m sorry.”

  I realized that I kept apologizing, and I didn’t even know what for anymore. I was just sorry. I was sorry for everything that was happening.

  “I’ll make some sandwiches,” Mr. Protsky said. “Then why doesn’t everyone lie down for a bit? We can talk in the morning. Kieren, unfold the cot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kieren responded, springing into action. He still seemed lighter somehow, as if none of the talk of divorce or anything else was affecting him. Robbie was alive, and I realized that, even if Robbie never forgave him, that was all Kieren needed to know.

  Mr. Protsky left the room and Scott came back from the bathroom.

  I felt a bit lost. Everyone seemed to have found their station in the room. Scott helped Kieren unfold the cot, where he had clearly crashed many times before. Robbie and Piper sat together on the couch, exchanging more of their secret whispers. But I had no place here.

  I wanted to run and hide, but there was nowhere to go.

  After a minute, Mr. Protsky came back with sandwiches and everyone began to devour them. Robbie still didn’t talk to Kieren, or even look at him, but seeing the two of them silently stuff their mouths, both leaning over the same little coffee table, brought at least a sense of peace to quiet me.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Kieren asked me.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t think of food. I just wanted to watch this scene and pretend it was the whole truth, that we were together again and that everything was back to normal.

  But it wasn’t. Outside that door, everything in our town had turned upside down. My real mother was gone, and that hideous mannequin had taken her place.

  “Listen, Dad’s right,” Kieren said, nodding to his father. “Everyone should crash here. You’ve already risked too much being out this late. Um, Scott, take the cot. Robbie, we can fold out the couch bed for you and Piper.”

  “Not in my house,” stated Mr. Protsky, steely and forceful once again.

  “Right,” Kieren said. “Okay, um . . .”

  “It’s fine,” Piper said, taking my hand. “Marina and I can share a bed. It’ll be like a slumber party. Where should we go?”

  Kieren looked to his dad to make sure it was okay with him, and apparently it was.

  “Come on,” Kieren said. “You can have my room.”

  “Just a sec,” I said, kneeling down for a moment by Robbie. “You okay?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  His big vacant eyes fell on me, then focused for a moment. He smiled a bit, looking for all the world like our mother. I gave him another hug, and stood to follow Kieren and Piper up the stairs.

  I was struck by how everything in the house was just as I remembered it, although blanketed under a layer of dust. The dining room didn’t seem used anymore, and the lumpy living-room couch seemed relegated to a cat’s bed. It was like time had left the house behind.

  When we got into Kieren’s room, he quickly started pushing dirty clothes out of the way, and I was reminded of the time I had walked into Brady’s room and he had done the same thing. Boys were funny to me, always conscious of how they were being perceived, assuming they were being judged. I didn’t care if his room was messy.

  “I’m going to find the little girls’ room,” Piper said. “Do you have an extra toothbrush?”

  “Um . . . ,” Kieren began.

  “Never mind. That’s why God gave us fingers, I guess.” She went into the hallway, and we both watched her go.

  I turned and examined Kieren’s shelves. I had never actually been in his room before. We always used to play in the rec room when we were kids. On one shelf were two pictures—one of me, him, and Robbie that one of our mothers must have taken at a park somewhere, all hanging from some monkey bars and smiling for miles, and the other of just me. I didn’t recognize myself at first, but then I remembered it. It was the one Robbie had taken of me at the pyramid house.

  “You kept this?” I asked.

  “I love that picture,” Kieren said, walking closer.

  I flinched, embarrassed to know I had been living on his shelf all these years. “I didn’t recognize myself,” I said. I wondered how much of that child was left in me now. What would she think, if she were looking at a picture of me?

  In this brief moment of privacy, we both grew shy, but finally Kieren came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. We stood there together a moment, looking at the picture and holding each other.

  “Why isn’t it back to normal, Kieren?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out in the morning,” he said. “I’ll take you to the old grounds. There’s someone there who might be able to help.”

  “The old grounds?”

  “All done!” Piper exclaimed, coming back into the room. “You know you’re almost out of toothpaste,” she said to Kieren, pushing some books off his bed and climbing in like she owned the place.

  I laughed, breaking away from Kieren. “I guess it’s my turn.”

  “I’ll explain in the morning,” Kieren said, nodding to Piper and excusing himself from the room.

  “Is Kieren your boyfriend now?” Piper asked after he had left.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I went to brush my teeth. I almost didn’t recognize my image in the mirror, I looked so tired and so changed. For a moment, I actually thought I looked like my mother. The real one, not the lady in the pyramid house.

  When I was done, I climbed into Kieren’s bed, trying to smell some trace of him in the sheets, but they didn’t smell like anything. Piper rolled to face me.

  “I miss talking to girls,” she said. “Do you have a lot of girlfriends?”

  I thought of Christy, and the girls I had known at St. Joe’s. I felt so far away from all of them, but I did miss them. “Not really. You must have a lot, huh?”

  “I guess,” she said, seeming disinterested. “They don’t know me. No one knew me, until Robbie.”

  “Not even Brady?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to bring him up, but I couldn’t help it. She hadn’t mentioned him at all, really. Didn’t she miss him? Didn’t she love him anymore?

  She was quiet for so long, I wondered if she had heard me. “Brady and I were together for a long time,” she finally said. “And I think, in some ways, he was always going to see me as fourteen. I think he thought of me as this pretty child who got lost somewhere in a field or something, and it was his job to make sure I didn’t get lost again.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” It sounded lovely to me, to have a protector, to have a guardian who would never let anything bad happen to me.

  “We’re not children,” Piper said, referring to herself and me. “It’s easy to play the part. Especially when you’re pretty. Like we are.”

  I must have blushed. I had never heard anyone talk like her before. Piper didn’t seem to have an ounce of insecurity in her body.

  “But we can’t do that to ourselves,” she continued. And then she smiled at me, starting to look sleepy.

  “You didn’t want to go to Colorado?”

  “God no,” she said. “I like the beach. Your brother and I were talking about living by the ocean someday. In a little house, you know?”

  I nodded. I had never known that my brother liked the ocean. He had only seen it once, when we visited my aunt in Boston. And it didn’t occur to me that he had noticed it at all.

  “Would you like that?” Piper asked me. “To live with us by the beach?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where I want to live.”

  Piper grew quiet then, drifting away. I thought of my dream apartment, and my fire-engine-red bathroom. They w
eren’t mine. They were Sage’s. And now, my fantasies stripped away, I was left with no imaginary escape to dream of.

  CHAPTER 20

  The old grounds, as they apparently used to be called, were completely altered when we all arrived there in the morning. The gas station that had occupied most of the lot for as long as I could remember was gone, and the few scattered skeletons of old carnival games were no longer abandoned and ravaged by time, but rather freshly scrubbed, apparently once again being used by the children of the local diplomats who had settled here.

  Of course, this early in the morning, the place was abandoned yet again, a filmy layer of dew having settled over the cool night onto the empty bucket seats of the Ferris wheel and the shuttered-up vendor stalls boasting funnel cake and fresh cups of hot cocoa.

  We were all there, everyone from the night before, with Mr. Protsky leading the charge.

  “Where do we go?” I asked Kieren, although anyone could have heard me.

  “The fun house,” answered Mr. Protsky, walking across the grounds to a large structure looming over the back of the field.

  We all followed silently. Scott continued to trail behind Kieren and me like a nefarious shadow, silently boring his eyes into my back with a heated anger.

  I began to wonder if Scott was in love with Kieren, or if he just blamed me for everything that had gone wrong. And despite my resentment of being viewed in that way, I couldn’t exactly argue that it wasn’t true.

  “Kieren,” I whispered. “Why are we meeting here in the open? Wouldn’t it be better at your dad’s house?”

  “It’s okay,” he answered. “No one will see us.” He looked around the grounds, his face seeming to assess how much they’d changed. “I guess this place used to have some significance for them.”

  “For who?”

  But he only put a hand on my back and led me inside, trusting that the question was about to answer itself.

  We had to enter the fun house through the rotating cylinder that normally served as an exit; at the moment it wasn’t moving. I expected it to be dark inside, but instead found it well lit with camping lanterns, which illuminated, in grotesque silhouettes, the fun-house mirrors and distorted walls.

  I was surprised to find a small breakfast party already assembled inside the fun house, and even more surprised to discover who was in the group.

  Sage was there, having a morning cup of coffee, which she sipped gently out of a small tin cup, and she was joined by John and George. Sage’s white flowing dress and John’s dirty fingernails revealed that these were the real people from Portland, and not the altered personas that lived in that bitter land under the lake.

  “Hello, dear,” Sage said when she saw me, not seeming the least bit thrown by my presence.

  “Sage,” I said, taking a moment to process it all. “What are you doing here?”

  Sage and John both laughed at my tone, and I realized that my words had come out sounding a bit harsher than I had meant.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “Is that him?” John cut in, addressing Mr. Protsky and cutting to the chase in his usual brusque manner. He clearly meant Robbie. This was becoming a pattern. Nobody wanted to address Robbie directly, as though he was merely a ghost floating through the room and the only way to confirm his presence was to ask one of the living.

  “It is,” Mr. Protsky confirmed.

  “Oh, boy,” Sage said, taking in Robbie with a sweet twinkle in her eye. “He’s so tall.”

  “I can hear you,” Robbie said, but nobody paid him any mind. Piper whispered something in his ear and he nodded.

  “Hello, Piper,” said Sage, finally standing and approaching to give Robbie’s beautiful new girlfriend a hug. Piper, in turn, was warm and overjoyed to see Sage, hugging her back with an intense sincerity. “You made it home,” Sage said, clearly relieved.

  “I did. Marina told me what you did for her . . . and for Brady.”

  “Have you seen him?” I asked Sage. “Did he come back?”

  Sage shook her head gently. “I don’t know. If he did, he didn’t stop to say hi.”

  A flash of worry passed over Piper’s face, but then she turned back to Robbie, who offered her an encouraging embrace.

  “Why are you here then, Sage?” I asked again, not caring this time if I sounded rude.

  “The highway runs both ways, doesn’t it?” asked Sage, not the least bit perturbed by my tone. “We heard what was happening in the town.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I did,” said Mr. Protsky, sitting down and helping himself to a cup of coffee from the nearby pot.

  Seeing him sit down with such familiarity next to Sage and John, I realized something that I had never put together before. And I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

  “You know each other,” I said, quite dumbly.

  “Can we get some breakfast, Dad?” Kieren asked. “M and I could run and get something . . .”

  “I’m not going,” I said, finally doing the math. “You went to the high school too,” I said to Mr. Protsky. And then I looked at Sage and John, and even at sullen George, who sat like a log the whole time, sipping his coffee, deeply immersed in whatever thoughts occupied that sad old brain of his.

  “I did,” Mr. Protsky admitted.

  “So you know,” I began. “You know about DW.” I replayed the last four years of my life, the rift between our families after the accident. The way my mother hated Kieren and hated his whole family. “You always knew about it.”

  “I knew that there was a group of kids messing around with something in the basement,” he said, nodding to Sage and the others. “We didn’t exactly run in the same circles, though, and I figured it had nothing to do with me.”

  “But you knew that our mom was part of the group,” I insisted, still reeling from the fact that I’d never put this together. I looked to Robbie, who seemed to be processing this information as well. How could we have not known this growing up?

  “Have you known this whole time that Robbie was in DW? Since the start? And that our mother would try to go in after him?”

  “Your mother called me, right after the accident. She said she suspected it, and she told me about the portal on the tracks. But I told her not to try to follow him, that it was too dangerous. At that time, it was soon enough after he had entered . . .”

  “Go on,” Robbie prodded, hearing for the first time what had been happening on the other side of reality from his imprisonment on that train.

  Mr. Protsky finally turned to Robbie, and his voice shifted. A sadness entered it, a weakness. His eyes kept blinking, like Robbie was the sun and he couldn’t stand to stare straight at him. Yet he continued.

  “I was hoping you’d find your own way out. I knew if we sent anyone in after you, they would just . . .”

  “Be stuck on the train too,” finished Piper, taking Robbie’s hand. “And you were right—we would have been stuck there forever,” she added, turning to me. “But we were saved.”

  “So why aren’t things back to normal?” I asked. Sage and John exchanged a look, and I turned to confront them both. “You said when I took Robbie out, that things would go back to normal.”

  “That’s not exactly what I said,” Sage explained.

  “Yes, it is,” I almost shouted. “You said he was trapped between the planes, that that was the problem. Well, he’s not trapped anymore! I saved him.”

  Robbie put his hand on my back, and Kieren had begun to pace. I was upsetting everyone in the room, but I didn’t care anymore. I had done everything I was told. Why wasn’t it enough?

  “Why isn’t everything okay now?” I asked, hearing the hysteria in my own voice. “Why have the planes crossed like this?”

  “You were supposed to push him,” came the calm,
otherworldly voice of George, who still sat in a trance next to his friends, not looking up to meet my eyes.

  “What?” I asked, my head spinning. Robbie had to steady me for a moment as I tried to gain my balance.

  “Push him off the train,” George explained. “Back through the portal. That was the way.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, looking at John. “You said that was the only way off the train, but you were wrong. You don’t need to go back out through the portal. You just need to pay for your ticket. That’s how we got here. You just need . . .”

  “A special coin,” John finished my sentence. “A coin made on the rails at the portal site.”

  I felt like a dead weight had come from nowhere and collapsed on the building. Nobody spoke for a moment.

  “You knew,” I said, realizing the gravity of what John had tried to do. He had commanded me to kill my brother, knowing that it wasn’t necessary. “You knew about the coin, and you still told me pushing him was the only way off the train.”

  “I didn’t say it was the only way off the train,” John explained, trying to remain calm. “I said it was the only way that would work.”

  “He’s not supposed to be here, not like this,” said Sage, trying, as she always seemed to be doing, to soften the blow of her husband’s words. “Your mother and her son—the other Robbie—they’ve taken the place of the ones who were here.”

  “No,” I immediately countered. “Mom went into DW. She’s probably trying to make her way back right now.”

  “Your mother is gone,” Sage said, her voice oddly calm. “She’s been in too long. That other woman, the one you saw under the lake—she’s all that’s left now.”

  The words fell over the crowd, and I finally grew silent, trying to understand.

  “That’s why you’re never supposed to stay on the other side for too long,” she continued. “It doesn’t make much difference if you take your other self’s place for a few minutes or even a few days. But if you stay for too long, you officially fill their place in the world. And the other version—the one that was supposed to be there—can never come back. Matter cannot be created or destroyed.”