by Rucker Moses
“Sure.”
“So I’ll put it to you plainly. Your father ain’t exactly gone. But he ain’t never coming back.”
I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting something about the box or my invisible hand . . .
Uncle Long goes on. “I see you’re quiet for once. Good. That’s wise. ’Cause there’s a lot to open your mind to, and if you’re busy talking or thinking up questions or what to say, you also busy not listening.”
“I’m listening,” I blurt.
He pauses and looks at me cross, like I’m not getting his point. “Well, what’d I just say?”
“Your father ain’t exactly gone. But he ain’t never coming back,” I repeat.
“Well, yeah. Now you remember yesterday—what you first came in my lab here to ask me?”
“I thought you said not to think up questions—”
“Quit trying so hard to be smart, kid, you’ll get a brain cramp,” he snaps.
He’s right. He’s here trying to tell me something important. It’s almost like I can’t help it. Like, if I sit here and listen to what he has to tell me, I won’t be a kid anymore.
“Okay. I came to ask . . .” What did I ask? About where’s Pop? About why we don’t magic the dishes clean every night? What was it? “I asked about real magic.”
“That’s right, you did. And to be honest, that impressed me. Because it’s the first and most important question, out of all the stuff that your mama don’t want you to know and Crooked don’t want you to know. Something, I think, your daddy was close to wanting to tell you when you got a little older.”
“That—?”
“That yes. Magic is real. Really real.”
I nod and blink a few times. Now I already know that magic is really real, but it’s still startling to hear an adult actually admit something.
“And what’s happening with my hand?” I ask. “I know it’s magic. But, like, do you get what’s going on?”
“I’m getting to that. But it starts with your daddy, and where he’s gone, and why he had to go.”
“Why did he?” I ask.
“He was protecting us.”
“Couldn’t he protect us and stay? Did he have to go?”
My uncle’s eyelids seem heavy, but I think he’s more sad than sleepy. He slumps his shoulders.
“I’ve asked myself that question maybe a thousand times,” he says. “And a thousand times, the answer is yes. He had to go.”
“But why?”
“Here’s where you got to understand how the whole magic thing works. Now, you’ve been to the aquarium, yes?”
“Which one?”
He sighs. “You’ve been to an aquarium?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, you know how you’re on one side, and there’s this thick glass, and on the other side of the glass it’s all water and aquatic life, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how our world is with magic. We’re protected by something like that thick glass, though you can’t see it. And on the other side of that glass is magic, or a magical realm. Some folks call it the Realm. Now, say there was a fish, ended up on our side of the glass. Just to survive, they would need some of that water. Just to survive, they would be letting some of the Realm into our world. That’s like cracking a hole in that glass between you and the fishes and whatnot on the other side of the aquarium, you get me?”
“I think I do. So there’s a fish from the other side of the glass. And it’s drawing water into our reality?”
“Exactly. Now, when glass gets too many cracks in it, what happens to it?”
I close my eyes, and think of the Mirror onstage at the Mercury. “It shatters.”
“Exactly. Reality itself would explode. So Maestro’s Mirror? That thing was like a hole clean through the glass. A portal that allowed Maestro to jump into the Realm. Only something was pulling the Realm into our world, too, and if Preston hadn’t destroyed it?” He slowly shakes his head and draws an imaginary line across his throat. “That’s all she wrote.”
“But what’s that mean? What would happen? Like, how could it be so bad?”
He gives me a look that’s serious as a graveyard. “What happens when the glass breaks at the aquarium?”
“I’m guessing your feet get wet.”
“Well, imagine all the water in the ocean is on the other side. No end to it gushing all around you, up to your ears, until the reality on the other side of that glass drowns our reality as we know it. No breathing, no thinking, no anything. Us and everything we know, gone. Replaced by whatever comes through that busted glass.” He shakes his head. “Your pop saved us all.”
“So why couldn’t Dad have just broken the Mirror? Why did he have to jump through?”
“Here’s the kicker. If he’d broken the Mirror from our side of things, that portal? It would remain open in perpetuity.” He draws the word out like it has a dozen syllables. Then he pauses to make sure I understand. “No, Preston had to shatter the portal from inside the Realm. That was the only way to close it.”
“So what’s all this got to do with this box?”
“A little device of Preston’s. He was always looking for a safe way to access the Realm without making a rift. When you put your hand in there, and your buddy Too Tall fell on you, you must have made a rift anyways. What with the blue light and all of that. A small rift, but a rift between worlds nonetheless. Your hand must have got stuck in the in-between. I never heard of anything like that happening. But that’s the only explanation I got for your hand there, doing what it’s doing.”
“It’s not doing a whole lot,” I grumble.
“Doing a lot more than you know, being in two places at once. Part of your hand is here, in our world. That’s how you can put your glove on and climb ladders and alla that. But part of your hand is there. In the Realm. And that’s how you conjured a smoke fist and sent those kids flying a couple football fields.”
I stare at my gloved hand, tapping each finger to my thumb. “Are you saying I can touch the Realm, somehow?”
“It sounds like you already did.”
“So if I can touch the Realm, and Pop is in the Realm, can’t I, like, touch him?”
“Listen, King, it’s very important that you don’t try to use your hand to touch the Realm. Remember that fish out of water I was talking about? Imagine it’s more like a shark. And you’re just chum. Whatever Realm power you tap into, she’ll smell it like blood in the water. You copy that?”
“I copy,” I repeat, though it’s only a reflex. “But who is this shark you’re talking about? Why’d you call her ‘she’?”
For the first time since I’ve been down here, Long Fingers perks up. He hefts his large, lumbering body out of that chair with the grace of a forklift and walks around his worktable and over to me. He squares me up by the shoulders, then puts his hands on his knees to bend to my eye level. His eyes are little brown cocoa beans in shot glasses of milk.
“Do. Not. Try. To. Use. Your. Hand. Don’t think about what it can do, and don’t try and find out. I want you to leave this box with me, and I’ll work on a way to get you right again. In the meantime, keep cool, wear that glove, and don’t tell anyone about this. Bad enough my daughter knows, li’l Princess of Mischief, that one.” He scrunches his mouth like this next bit is difficult to chew. “Now, I’d never tell you to hide anything from your ma . . .”
“But you’re telling me to do that?”
“I said I’d never do that. You know y’all’s relationship better than I do, and if you think she can hand—”
“I won’t say a word, Unc.”
He holds his hands up. “Your call. But listen, if you try and use that hand, and the Realm starts leaking in, and I find out, and I will find out, I’ll smell it—I’ma have to tell her. Because it’s too importa
nt. And if you won’t listen to me, you for sure better listen to her.”
“I won’t use it. I promise.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. If we lost Pop because this Realm stuff is that important, that’s enough for me,” I say, but I feel like I’m trying out the words to see how they sound. “I got one question, though. Couldn’t we use, like, just enough magic to bring Dad back? And then that’s it?”
He turns around and holds a pain in his lower back. “Good night, Young King. Good. Night.”
I’m sitting outside on the stoop and I can’t imagine hitting the pillow. I am wired, my heart racing like it’s got enough voltage running through it to power the county grid.
At 4:00 a.m., the street is so quiet I’d believe I’m back in the suburbs. Must be how they grow trees in Brooklyn, extra thick and gnarly and lush. The leaves swish in the breeze like they’re whispering secrets.
The one word that keeps playing in my head, from all the info my uncle just dumped on me, is sacrifice . . .
Because that’s what I understand now that maybe I never understood before.
I always had a sense that Pop did what he did for the greater good, because that’s the kind of person he is . . . or was? Is? I’m still not even sure.
And when I think about my hand, and the power that’s somehow at my invisible fingertips, and how I conjured a blast that scattered a handful of punks like bowling pins, the one thought that keeps me from tempting that power now is sacrifice.
If I lost Dad because he made a sacrifice, then I have to . . .
Also sacrifice.
I take my glove off to see if there’s been any change. But nothing.
Nothing at all.
Part of my hand, I guess the part I can’t see, is in the Realm . . .
And Dad is in the Realm.
Doesn’t that mean I could touch him?
The door opens behind me and the light casts two silhouettes down the stoop, mine and Veronica’s.
“Whatup, cuzzo.”
I put the white glove back on.
Veronica sits on the top step beside me, gives my face a good once-over, and smirks. “You look like how I feel after talking to my father for an hour.”
I chuckle and force a smile, but I’m just being polite.
“Oof. That bad, huh? Well, sorry to interrupt. I can see you’re staring out at the tree-lined block all romantic and pensive and whatnot.” She puts a hand on my shoulder like she’s about to get up. “Happy soul searching!”
“Wait,” I say. “Stay, please. Just got a lot on my mind, is all.”
“I know it, I do.”
“How much do you know?”
“You mean, like, about the Realm?” she says in a mock-spooky voice that actually does make me laugh for real.
“So you do know.”
“Only because I, like, spy on my dad and my uncle sometimes. Made my dad come clean one time, last May. He told me your dad jumped into that Mirror to save, like, reality itself or something. Pretty cool.” She shrugs. “Cooler than anything my dad ever did.”
“V, that doesn’t exactly make me feel better.”
“Well, maybe you’re looking at this the wrong way? I mean, sure, you lost your father. But he didn’t abandon you. I mean, he had a purpose. That’s kinda noble, don’t you think? It’s rare enough that people do anything good for anyone, much less for everyone. You know, King? People are terrible. But your father, he’s, like, not at all terrible.”
“Wow. You’ve got some low expectations, huh?”
“Can you blame me? My ma gave me up to that cantankerous blob back there. No one even told me why, but I know it wasn’t ’cause she was trying to save the world or anything. King, she was my mother and she gave me up. Like, if your mother doesn’t have your back, who does?”
I see a different side of Veronica then. She looks angry. And sure, I’ve seen lots of versions of her being angry, but usually she wears this smirk like she knows she’s got one up on all the suckers of the world. Now she looks like the opposite. Like she’s missing this one piece of basic equipment that everyone else walks around with, and it’s so natural that people like me don’t even realize we’ve got it. A mother to love you. Wow. That’s like missing a lung.
“Now, don’t go feeling sorry for me or nothing like that,” she warns me, maybe reading my expression. “I don’t want that at all. I will leave your little mopey self out here right now,” she digs at me, but her smile is gentle.
“Nah, I get it, V. Sometimes it feels like the stuff that happens to me is all that matters. But everybody goes through stuff. Is it weird, though, that, after all this talk about how noble my dad was or is or whatever, all this about how I should appreciate what he did for the greater good, it just makes me want him back, like, even more?”
“Yeah, I feel you. I mean, what can ya do?” she says, shrugging.
I feel something then, in my gloved hand. A tingling pressure that gets more and more insistent. Almost like fingertips pressing into my flesh.
“What is it?” asks Veronica.
“I—I don’t know.”
I take off the glove. I almost expect to see thumbs digging into my palm. But there’s nothing there, of course.
Then something very different presses into my hand. A crunch, like paper, like a balled-up piece of paper tucked into my palm, and then the other pressure closes my invisible fingers around the ball.
“King, what is it? You look like you’re seeing a ghost.”
I’m speechless. I feel my fist clutching onto a ball of paper, but I see absolutely nothing.
Then the pressure is gone. Nothing holding my fist closed.
So I open up my hand.
Out drops a balled-up sheet of yellow legal paper.
It lands between me and Veronica on the top step.
“Okay, wow. Where did that come from?” Veronica looks up. “There a large paper pigeon above us?”
I stare at the yellow ball and put my glove back on. I’m thinking I shouldn’t take it off anymore. Strange things seem to happen when I do.
“It was like someone crumpled it up and put it in my hand and closed my fist around it,” I say in amazement, exploring the street for any signs of life that’s not V or me. “I opened my hand, and this dropped out.”
Veronica looks at the paper, dumbfounded.
“Well.” She quickly recovers. “You going to look at it or what?”
I take a deep breath and pick up the paper in my flesh-and-blood right hand and begin unfolding. It’s all scrunched and knotted, like someone had fun when they balled this up.
I smooth it out on my knee and make out the handwriting:
You can save him.
He is still within reach.
He will not be for long.
Once he is gone,
he is gone forever.
Meet me at Mandrake Meadow.
You can save him.
“You can save him,” Veronica reads out loud from over my shoulder. “Whoa. That’s spooky.”
I stare at the words, reading them over and over:
You can save him.
Save him.
You can save him.
I can save him.
“Where’s this Mandrake Meadow?” I ask.
“So you’re not at all sketched out by this, um, how do I say, hands-free messaging?”
I shrug. “Got my attention, didn’t it? I mean, yeah, it’s spooky. But I’ve gotta see what this is about, don’t you think?”
“But why is this note anonymous? There’s just a lot of red flags. If they were trying to help, why not just come, like, in the light of day? And, like, visible?”
“There’s lots of questions I need to ask, I guess. But V, I just can’t help but think I should be abl
e to reach him somehow. Your pops told me my hand is half trapped in the Realm. If my hand is in the Realm, and we know Pops is in the Realm, well . . .”
. . . I can save him . . .
“I hear you,” says V. “Mandrake Meadow . . . That, I don’t know. But it sounds kind of familiar? Like something I just heard, or saw . . . God, it’s at the tip of my tongue . . .” And then something dawns on her. “King, you still have that map?”
The map. “V, I can’t believe I forgot all about it! I even forgot to mention it to your dad,” I say, and dig in my back pocket for the old folded-up piece of paper. I’m shaking my head at myself. “Jeez, I even tried to recount everything that happened for him, twice.”
“Sure,” V says dubiously. “You forgot all about it.”
“No, really—”
“I get it, King. You wanted to keep something to yourself. I’d probably do the same thing.”
Did I keep the map to myself on purpose? I wonder.
She gets her fingers on the map and tracks quickly to Mandrake Meadow, listed just a few blocks away from Pocket Playground with a little illustration of wavy lines that must represent grass or something.
“There,” she says. “Strange. I don’t know when this map was made, but there’s no meadow there now.”
I scan the names on the map. Some look familiar, but most of them don’t.
“Wow,” I say. “So whoever slipped me that note must know about this map, and know that we have it.”
It gets so quiet between us for a moment that I swear I hear crickets, even though there’s no crickets in Brooklyn.
“It just gets creepier, huh, King?” V finally speaks. “I’d tread very carefully if I were you. And don’t stay out here all night. If anybody needs a decent night’s sleep, it’s you.”
V goes to her room to either fall asleep or watch anime on her laptop. Whichever comes first, she says.
I spend another couple minutes out on the stoop before I tiptoe upstairs, doing my best not to wake Ma. I take each step in super-slow-mo, being extra quiet but also making sure I don’t stub my toe or trip on anything. The steps are so noisy, it doesn’t seem to matter. I hold on to the banister, but it’s loose and that makes the whole staircase creak and moan, so I rush up to the second floor like the ship’s about to go down.