Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  35

  Her mind cycled through its archive of especially photographic life moments, zeroing in on one of many filing cabinets, and then one of its many drawers. Next, her subconscious chose a file, revealing…

  She’d felt as delicate as a moth in her lace wedding dress. With her father beside her, she walked down the aisle toward Shaw in his purple paisley bow tie, beaming his crazy, toothy, overly exuberant grin.

  And a day with sunbeams, rainbows. Her dad, a big man, tiptoed like a goofball fairy through her mother’s garden—her mother mock angry—as Orla laughed, in love with his silliness. He retrieved her Frisbee and put it on his head like a hat.

  The day she won the only trophy of her life, a gold star set atop a fake marble column—green! It was her prize for winning the fourth-grade spelling bee. In spite of her prodigious abilities at dance, she’d been a terrible athlete at school, lanky and unaggressive. Wretched at sports. A loser. And her first few academic years had been a struggle too. Retarded giraffe. That was the name that had bothered her most. After she won the spelling bee, she finally believed her parents when they insisted she was smart. The trophy was a magic wand; school got better.

  A view of the darkened audience beyond the lights—her first time onstage with the corps at the Empire City Contemporary Ballet, a professional dancer who’d barely started to grow breasts. But even then, she appreciated having achieved what 99 percent of most dreamers never did. She’d been so nervous in the wings before she took flight onstage.

  Maybe the images went on for hours. Or maybe it was moments. Or maybe she saw nothing. She didn’t have a clear memory afterward, just the sense that things had occurred beyond what she could recall, not unlike waking up after a night of tumultuous dreams. Though the feeling of drowning lingered. Concrete in her lungs.

  She wasn’t sure if her eyes were open or closed. There was darkness. And the momentary sensation of slipping into nothingness, like falling into anesthesia. A few seconds of feeling altered before oblivion took over.

  When she returned to herself, she was on her mattress on the living-room floor. Cold. Stunned. I’m getting our bed all wet. She sat up, and a puddle squished beneath her. Water dripped from her soaked knit hat, ran in rivulets down her heavy sleeves. She kicked her stiff legs, her boots, over the edge of the mattress. Fumbled with the zipper on her coat. Her gloves. Fingers of bony ice. Half conscious.

  With her outerwear in a sodden pile, she kept going. Stripped off her socks. Her sweater. A part of her knew she couldn’t get warm until she was dry. Instinct. The rest of her awareness tottered like an old incandescent bulb at the end of its life. On/off. Blink. See. Dark. Blind.

  Her hand—a mother’s hand, before the mother was even fully awake—felt along the mattress for a small arm, a small foot, the reviving limbs of her children. It grew more frantic, reaching, fumbling. And finally the mother broke through her daze.

  Where am I?

  Home. The living room. Her bed.

  Where are the children?

  Not beside her. Not in the room.

  “Eleanor Queen? Tycho?” Her wet pants felt too constrictive against her skin. She peeled them off so she could run faster. Where?

  Even in just her underwear, she wasn’t as cold. The wet clothes had been a body bag; now she was free. The air in the room was warm. The house normal, just as they’d left it.

  “Eleanor Queen? Tycho?” She spun. Stepped a few feet toward Shaw’s studio. And a few feet toward the kitchen. No children. Where were they?

  She remembered being on the ice floe. Magnificence in the background, sculptural wonders in all the rich ocean colors—turquoise, indigo, cerulean—and chaos in the foreground. Eleanor Queen flailing in the water. And when Orla slipped in just after her, they started to sink.

  And she’d awakened here. Home. In her bed.

  Orla charged up the stairs. “Eleanor Queen!”

  She reached her daughter’s room first, and through the open door she saw her, rising to a sitting position, wobbly like a drunk. The girl started coughing.

  “Love—are you okay?” Orla didn’t wait for her to answer. She started stripping off her wet coat, boots, snow pants.

  “I’m okay,” Eleanor Queen said, sounding sleepy. Dazed. Her waterlogged hair dripped in her face.

  “Get out of these things, I’ll check on your brother.”

  Orla reached the end of the hallway in two long strides. “Tycho?”

  His door was closed. She flung it open, expecting to see her weepy boy shivering on his bed.

  There was just the mattress and its fitted sheet. The rest of his bedding had migrated to the living room the previous week. Still, Orla came in with her eyes glued to the bed. Did she expect to witness him rematerializing? She got on her hands and knees and looked beneath the bunk bed. Dust bunnies. A sock. A few Lego pieces. For good measure, she ran her hands over his mattress. Crazy. Of course he wasn’t there, so tiny she couldn’t find him, or an invisible lump that waited for her touch to turn him visible.

  She checked the upper bunk. Threw off his stash of toys. It was easy to picture his face emerging beneath the stuffed elephant and the golden-maned lion. But no. “Tycho?”

  Her frantic hands wouldn’t stop, even as her mind voiced the possibility—the fear—that he truly wasn’t there.

  “Mama?” Eleanor Queen stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket.

  But Orla didn’t look at her daughter—couldn’t look, not until she found her son. “Where is he?”

  “Mama, he’s not here.”

  “Tycho?” Orla ran next door to the room she’d once shared with Shaw. A naked bed frame. Box springs. Some dirty clothes scattered on the floor. She tugged on a pair of old sweatpants and a crumpled shirt. Opened her closet in case her son had been transported incorrectly. That’s what must have happened.

  “He’s not here,” Eleanor Queen said again, shocked but emphatic.

  “I’ll find him.”

  Something jittered in her head, her heart, a thing that wanted to slice her apart—but she was determined not to let it. She’d prove it wrong; she’d find him. She jogged down the stairs, barefoot, a moldy body aroma rising from the unwashed clothes. Shaw’s studio seemed like a possibility—it had been a bedroom once. She went straight for the closet. The gun locker taunted her and she slammed the door. Eleanor Queen chased after her, but Orla barreled past, heading for the kitchen.

  “He’s not here!” her daughter yelled as Orla stupidly checked the cabinet beneath the sink. Eleanor Queen beat her to the basement door and used her body to block it. “Mama! He didn’t fall in the water! He’s not here!”

  Orla froze for a moment, trying to make sense of her daughter’s words. “What? What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know! I just know he’s not here, I don’t feel him, and he needed to come through. With us. But he didn’t.”

  “He needs to come through the water?”

  “I think so.”

  Orla raced for the front door. If the spirit—fucking monster—sent them home through the water, then Tycho needed to jump in. But he’d never go into the water without her encouragement.

  She didn’t even have socks on but she hurtled out the door, expecting, hoping…

  Why couldn’t their house have been an island in a sea of glaciers? Water lapping up the porch steps? Tycho clinging to a patch of floating ice? She’d scramble across the floes as they drifted close to each other until she reached Tycho’s. And she’d carry him home the same way, leaping from each small berg to the next.

  Except the yard was normal—land, snow, wrecked garage. Tycho’s abandoned snow fort. Even their footprints in the path they’d taken to the mailbox. But the trees. The branches swayed in unison like black veils—mourning her loss? Or had they gathered to berate her? She couldn’t pretend anymore that it was a trick of the weather or her confusion: the tree line was even closer. The yard was half the area it had once been and populated by twice as many tree
s—all stark and leafless, not an evergreen in sight.

  Eventually they would form a fence around the house, a wall, solid and menacing. Charcoal trunks packed too tightly to allow their escape. Ready to crush them, if they proved too obstinate.

  “No…no. Tycho!” She paced the porch like an animal in a shrinking cage.

  Eleanor Queen held the door open, shifting from one cold foot to the other. “Maybe it starts at the end of the driveway—”

  “Yes!” Orla leapt off the porch. That’s where the troubles had started; she’d find him bobbing on an ice floe at the foot of the drive.

  “Mama, wait!” Eleanor Queen ducked inside, popped back out, and tossed her mother the sturdiest shoes from their boot tray, an old pair of Shaw’s slip-on Merrells. They were a little short for her, but Orla shoved her feet into them. Eleanor Queen held out her blanket, beneath which she wore only pajamas. “Here!”

  Orla grabbed the blanket from her daughter’s outstretched hand. “Get back inside in case he comes home!”

  Eleanor Queen nodded and started shutting the door, but kept her face in the crack, watching her mother.

  Orla’s toes rubbed up against the end of the shoes, and the snow came well past her bare ankles. But she didn’t care. She pulled the blanket tight over her head and shoulders, clutched it beneath her chin, and ran as fast as she could. Tycho didn’t like to be alone, not even if someone else was in the next room. She prayed he would grow impatient, hysterical even, and try to find his own way home. Under normal circumstances she’d never beg for her young son to fall into frigid water, but it was the only conduit she knew to get him back.

  The driveway had grown longer again. She ran and panted, afraid she was on a treadmill. Finally the mailbox came into view and the thing that had been threatening to gut her made a move, a sawing motion. Searing pain wailed up from her severing insides.

  “No…please!”

  There lay the road. Ordinary and deserted. Not an otherworldly landscape of water and ice.

  She stumbled past the driveway and onto the road. Did a crazy dance in a circle, spinning, looking for an opponent. Arms toward the heavens, body beyond the homestead boundary, she implored the entity to punish her again as She had before.

  “Come on! I’m back! What are You waiting for?”

  She pranced and hopped her way farther down the road. “See! I’m going! Come on!”

  But nothing happened. No rumbling ground. Not even the slightest bit of blowing snow.

  Orla fell to her knees, breathless. “Please! Give me my son back! Please!”

  She rocked forward, her energy spent, and laid her forehead on the gray, rutted snow. “Please give me my boy back,” she wailed. “Please give me my boy.”

  Frightened Tycho. Alone. Freezing. Gone from her forever. Choking as he sobbed and called for her, heartsick when she didn’t come. There was nothing else to imagine. The fucking monster had killed her husband, and now She had taken her precious little son.

  “He’s just a baby! Please give him back!”

  She was willing to pray there all day, maybe forever, even if her forehead stuck to the snow and turned black with frostbite.

  “Take me instead…please! You can have me.”

  A part of her didn’t want to keep living. A more distant part of her rumbled from beneath its hiding place. Pushing toward the surface.

  Her parents, her brother. She had had a little brother, and her parents hadn’t forsaken her after Otto died. A part of them might have died with him, but they came back—for her. Their love for their surviving daughter had only grown bigger. They hadn’t given up. And Orla couldn’t forget she had one child left. A little girl who needed her. Even a shattered, brokenhearted mother was better than none at all.

  Orla wept as she dragged herself home. Maybe she should have made a run for freedom, for help, while the road appeared normal. But she couldn’t let the thing win, swallow her entire family, and she was certain that’s what would happen if she left her daughter alone: Eleanor Queen would be gobbled up, erased from the earth like her son. And Orla would have no more reasons to live.

  “What have I done to You that You should take everything from me?” She stumbled. Wanted to lie down in the white grave and die. But she kept going.

  Why was the fucking spirit—what was She?—trying to destroy her family? Had Orla been such a terrible person? Made so many horrible or selfish mistakes? Had she done something so awful to the world that she deserved such vengeance?

  “I’ll do better.” She limped up the stairs to the porch. Everything hurt. Her flesh and blood no longer existed; she’d been flash-frozen, dipped in liquid nitrogen. If her heart screamed its distress, her entire body would shatter. If she so much as wiggled her toes, her bones would splinter into fragments.

  She was barely aware of what she was putting on—Shaw’s sweater, a second pair of pants, layers of dirty socks; she had to be prepared to stay outside for a long time. There was only one thing to do: scour the haunted land until she found her son. But Eleanor Queen seemed determined to block her way. The girl chased her down the stairs, grabbing onto the hem of her too-large sweater. “Mama!”

  “I don’t have time, Bean—he’s going to freeze to death!” He might still be out there, somewhere.

  Orla rammed her arms into her coat sleeves. Eleanor Queen snatched her mother’s wet boots from the floor and hugged them to her chest as she backed away.

  “You’re not listening!” the girl screamed. “I thought you were going to listen!”

  The frenzy subsided. Orla turned her shaken attention to her daughter. Eleanor Queen spoke with the solid, even cadences of an adult—an adult who couldn’t afford to lose the fleeting attention of her wounded audience lest something worse happen.

  “Mama, Tycho isn’t here. He isn’t inside. He isn’t outside. He is not here.” Orla felt herself start to melt, the cold collapse of an ice sculpture slipping from its base. “I’m sorry. It won’t help to look. He’s…” Eleanor Queen shook her head. “Gone.”

  Her voice broke and she wept, clutching her mother’s boots like a life preserver. Orla slipped off her gloves, let them fall to the ground. She took Eleanor Queen in her arms, startled by her warmth—this one creature in all the world was still alive.

  “We can look…we can try…” Orla’s voice fractured too. It felt too much like giving up.

  “Please, Mama. I don’t want anything else to happen.”

  Orla held her tighter. It wasn’t fair. They’d tried so hard to do right by the spirit—and she’d thought She understood about a mother’s love for her child. She should’ve gone on, pushed past her exhaustion the previous night to tell Her about Tycho, the sweetest little boy. She screamed in her mind so She would know: You’re not getting anything else!

  Orla had to find a way to resurrect herself from her grief, as her parents had done. They’d shown her the way; one child was reason enough to keep on living.

  The entity wasn’t going to let them leave. She still wanted something from them—from Eleanor Queen. Orla had to make herself a fortress, a barrier no monster could break through, and protect the last of her family.

  36

  She remembered there being a little white coffin. It was a false memory. Her little brother, Otto, had been cremated. Her parents were practical people—her mother, Aoife, a pharmacist; her father, Thomas, a veterinarian. They’d known Otto might die since he was one and a half years old. It started with what Aoife had thought was a stomach bug; the doctor hadn’t initially been concerned. When the vomiting persisted, they rushed him back for more tests. His digestive system, it turned out, was fine; he was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumor.

  The seizures started in the hours before his first surgery. Orla, then almost six, remembered being scared and confused, but mostly because her regular life was upended when her parents took turns staying with Otto at the hospital. It was as if they’d gone from a family of four to a family of two,
in rotating pairs. But eventually things settled into a new routine in which they all treated baby brother like a featherless bird who’d fallen from a nest.

  Young Orla didn’t think it was weird that her baby brother always seemed like a baby. He crawled instead of walked, babbled instead of talked, even when he was three, then four. Her parents said it was because he was sick, and the chemotherapy was Very Serious Medicine. Otto was like a living doll, and Orla had loved him way more than either of their two cats. They’d all thought the Very Serious Medicine would fix him, but later her parents sat down and told her baby brother’s Very Bad Cells couldn’t be fixed.

  She was eight when he died. Everyone wept quietly at the funeral, like they were afraid of making too much noise. People spoke with lowered voices; they even moved slowly. Judging by the adults around her, young Orla thought death must be a most precarious situation, one in which the newly dead could easily become unsettled. His little urn was surrounded by massive bunches of flowers, every color of the rainbow. Still, Orla always recollected seeing a white coffin. He couldn’t fit in the urn, even all curled up, even though he’d always been such a small and delicate boy. In her mind, she gave him a coffin with squishy toys and soft blankets. She even left lots of extra room, in case he grew.

  People said things to her like “He just wasn’t meant to be here very long”—which made Orla wonder where he was meant to be, and if he would grow up there with new parents and someone else as his sister. She thought about that a lot when she was still little, in elementary school, and sometimes it made her sad that Otto had left them for another family, and sometimes it made her happy that maybe he wasn’t as dead as everyone seemed to think.

  For months after he died, relatives and random old people would tell her, “He’s watching you from heaven now.” If her mother was present, she’d purse her lips and narrow her dark eyes and say, “I know you mean well, but please don’t confuse her.” If her father was present, he’d look at his shoes and not say anything. They couldn’t, at that point, find a way to explain to one child why another had died. As Orla grew a little older she figured it out for herself—there was no rational reason for his death; it was no one’s fault, and no one could have prevented it, neither doctors nor priests. She couldn’t voice it to her parents, ever, but she’d understood then, on some level, that Otto had had a defect—something wasn’t right in his head. His cells grew altogether wrong and pushed on his brain and that’s why he could only act like a baby. And never grow up. A fatal defect.