by Ransom Riggs
She nodded. “I’m glad. I hope you never feel like that, because it’s terrible.”
“Have you ever felt like that?” I asked.
She nodded. “About Abe. After he left, especially.”
“Hm.” I tried to keep my expression neutral, but I was hurt.
“It was bad. I was really obsessed for a few years. I think he was, too, in the beginning. But for him, it wore off. For me, it only got worse.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“Because I was trapped in our loop, and he wasn’t. It makes the world feel very small to be cooped up like that for years and years. It isn’t good for the mind or the soul. It makes small problems seem very large. And a longing for someone that might otherwise have subsided after a few months became . . . consuming. For a while I was actually considering trying to run away and join him in America—even though it would have been extremely dangerous for me.”
I tried to imagine Emma as she was then. Lonely and pining, living on the letters he sent less and less frequently, the outside world a distant dream.
The factory gave way to rolling fields. Horses grazed in the morning mist.
“Why didn’t you try?” I said. Emma wasn’t the type of person to shrink from a challenge, especially for someone she loved.
“Because I was afraid he wouldn’t have been as happy to see me as I would’ve been to see him,” she said. “And that would’ve killed me. But also, it would just have been trading one loop for another, one prison for another. Abe wasn’t loop-bound. I would’ve had to find some nearby loop to live in, like a bird in a cage, and then wait for him to come visit me when he had time. I’m not cut out for that—to be a ship captain’s wife, watching the sea every day, worried and waiting—I’m meant to be the one out there, journeying.”
“But now you are,” I said. “And now you’re with me. So why are you still hung up on my grandfather?”
She shook her head. “You make it sound so simple. But it’s not easy to switch off something I felt for fifty years. Fifty years of longing and hurt and anger.”
“You’re right, I can’t imagine. But I thought this was behind us. I thought we’d talked it all through.”
“We did,” she said. “I thought I was over it, too. I wouldn’t have said all the things I said to you if I didn’t. I just . . . I didn’t know how much coming here would affect me. Everything we’ve been doing, all the places we go—it’s like his ghost is around every corner. And that old wound I thought had healed keeps getting sliced open, over and over again.”
“For pity’s sake,” said Enoch from the back seat, “can you two finish breaking up so I can go back to sleep?”
“You’re supposed to be asleep already!” Emma said.
“Who can sleep with all this heartbroken yammering?”
“We’re not breaking up,” I said.
“Oh? Could’ve fooled me.”
Emma tossed a wadded-up potato chip bag at Enoch. “Go crawl in a hole.”
He snickered and closed his eyes again. He may have gone to sleep, or he may not have. Either way, we no longer felt free to talk. So we just rode, and in lieu of words I reached out my hand, and Emma took it, our hands clasped awkwardly below the gearshift, fingers interlaced and gripping tight, as if we were both afraid to let go.
Emma’s words circled in my head. Part of me was grateful for what she’d said, but a bigger part of me wished she hadn’t said it at all. There had always been a small, quiet voice inside me that whispered, in dark moments, She loved him more. But I had always been able to shut it up, to drown it out. Now Emma had handed it a megaphone. And I would never be able admit it to her, because then she would know I had already been nurturing this little fear, that I was insecure, and that would only make the little voice louder. So I just squeezed her hand and kept driving.
Driving the cool car your grandfather owned, the little voice nagged. To go on a mission you inherited from him. To prove . . . what?
That I was as capable and necessary and deserving of respect as he had been.
I had said I didn’t want my grandfather’s life, and that was true enough. I wanted my own. But I wanted people to feel about me the way they did about him. Having named it, I could see how pathetic it was. But giving up and turning back now would be more pathetic still. The only choice, as I saw it, was to succeed at this so much that I broke the mold, won everybody’s respect, escaped my grandfather’s shadow once and for all, and got the girl—not an echo of the affection she’d felt for Abe, but every last bit of her.
It was a tall order. But at least this time the fate of all peculiardom didn’t hang in the balance. Just my relationship and my sense of self-worth.
Ha.
Then Enoch, who had, again, only been pretending to be asleep, said, “After you break up with Emma, can I ride up front? Bronwyn’s massive legs are crushing me.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Emma said. “Actual murder.”
Enoch sat forward. Put a hand to his heart, feigning shock. “Oh my God. You’re not going to do it, are you, Jacob?”
“Mind your own damn business,” I said.
“Grow a spine, man. The girl’s still in love with your grandfather.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said loudly enough to wake up Bronwyn and Millard.
“Then who were you saying I love you to on the phone yesterday, if not Abe?”
“What?” I said, swiveling in my seat to look at Emma. “What phone?”
She was staring a hole through her lap.
“The one around the back of that filling station in 1965,” said Enoch. “Uh-oh! You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“That was a private conversation,” Emma muttered.
We were about to pass an exit, and I swung the car off the highway at the last possible moment.
“Whoa!” said Bronwyn. “Don’t kill us!”
I pulled off the side of the road, parked, got out, and walked away from the car without looking back. There was a freeway overpass nearby and I stalked into the shadows beneath it, shuffling through a tide of trash thrown from passing cars. It sounded like an ocean under there.
“I should’ve told you.” It was Emma, coming up behind me.
I kept walking. She followed.
“I’m sorry, Jacob. I’m sorry. I had to hear his voice one last time.”
She had talked to his past self, some long-ago looped version of him from the days when he was merely middle-aged.
“You don’t think I wish I could talk to him? Every day?”
“You know it’s not the same.”
“You’re right, it’s not. He was your boyfriend. You loved him. But that man raised me. He meant more to me than my own father. And I loved him more than you did.” I was shouting to be heard above the echoing roar of traffic. “So you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to make secret phone calls to past-Abe when I’ve been dying to talk to him again. You don’t get to tell me I don’t understand what it’s like to miss someone or to be angry he left you behind and kept secrets from you. Because I do know what that’s like.”
“Jacob, I—”
“And you don’t get to tell me you love me, and tell me we’re going to be together, and flirt with me and be cute and sweet and strong and amazing and all the wonderful things that you are and then be heartsick about him and tell him you love him behind my back!”
“I was saying goodbye. That’s all.”
“But you kept it a secret. That’s the worst part.”
“I was going to talk to you about it,” she said “but we’re always surrounded by other people.”
“How can I believe you?”
“I wanted to. I did. It was eating a hole in me. But I didn’t know how.”
“You just say it: I still love him! I can’t get him out of my
mind! You’re just a pale imitation of him, but you’ll do in a pinch!”
Her eyes got wide. “No, no, no. Don’t say that. That’s not what you are at all. At all.”
“That’s how it feels. Isn’t that why you came along on this mission with me?”
“What,” she said, voice rising to a shout, “are you talking about?”
“Aren’t you just living out some old fantasy? Trying to make up for feeling left behind all those years? Here’s your chance to finally go on a mission with Abe—or the next best thing.”
“Now you’re not being fair!”
“Oh no?”
“NO!” she shouted, spinning away from me just as a little ball of flame escaped from her clenched fists and sprayed across the ground, catching a few fast-food wrappers and a filthy old sweater on fire.
She turned slowly back to face me. “That isn’t why,” she said, speaking slowly, deliberately. “I came along because this meant a lot to you. Because I wanted to help you. It had nothing whatsoever to do with him.”
“The grass is catching on fire.”
We ran to stomp it out, and when we had—our ankles and shoes covered with kicked dirt—she said, “I should’ve listened to my instincts. They said never to come to Florida. Never go to the place where Abe lived. It would feel too much like I was chasing his ghost.”
“And is that what you’re doing?”
She took a second and really seemed to think it over. “No,” she said finally.
“Sometimes it feels like that’s what I’m doing.”
Her face changed. She looked at me with a new openness, and for the first time in minutes she showed a glimmer of vulnerability. “You’re not chasing his ghost,” she said. “You’re standing on his shoulders.”
I started to smile, then stopped myself. I wanted to reach for her, but kept my hands in my pockets. Something still felt wrong, and I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t there. A moment of shared understanding couldn’t fix this.
“If you want me to leave, just say it,” she said. “I’ll go back to the Acre. There’s plenty for me to do there.”
I shook my head. “No. I just don’t want us to lie to each other. About what we are, or what we’re doing.”
“Okay.” She crossed her arms tightly across her chest. “Then what are we?”
“We’re friends.”
My body went cold as I said it. But it felt true and right. We were unequal in our feelings for each other, and my only choice was to pull back. We stood there for a long moment, the sound of traffic washing over us in waves, not knowing quite what to do next. And then she put her arms around me and hugged me, and said she was sorry.
I didn’t return the hug.
She let go and started back toward the car without me.
* * *
• • •
The others were hungry, so we bought coffee and breakfast sandwiches at a drive-through and then got back on the road. Emma stayed up front next to me, but for a long time we didn’t speak to each other. The others didn’t know what had happened between us, but they knew something had gone down, and even Enoch was smart enough not to mention it again.
Emma and I seemed to agree, without needing to discuss it, that we wouldn’t talk about our personal issues in front of the others. We wouldn’t argue. We would be professional. We would finish the mission. And when it was over, maybe we wouldn’t see each other for a while.
I tried not to think about it. I tried to lose myself in the rhythm of the road. But the hurt was always there, throbbing just above the threshold of ignorability, painful enough to distract me a little at all times.
We began to hit the big cities of the East Coast, Washington, DC, first among them. One of the maps Abe and I had made when I was younger covered this part of the Northeast Corridor and his obscure markings were scribbled all over it. Some roads on the map were crosshatched, others reinforced with parallel lines. Surrounding each city were clusters of symbols: dotted lines in a pyramid, a spiral inside a triangle. It was clear that each corresponded to a location of importance to Abe and H and the other hunters, but whether they indicated something helpful or dangerous, we didn’t know.
As we were driving around the DC Beltway, we came very close to one such oddly marked place, and we debated stopping to check it out.
“Could be a safe house,” said Millard. “Or a murder den. No way of knowing.”
“All these marks could be different loops,” said Bronwyn.
“Or different girlfriends,” said Enoch.
Emma gave him a bloodthirsty stare.
And then my phone rang. It took me a moment to excavate it from beneath a layer of napkins and cold french fries on the center console.
On the screen it said ME, which meant someone was calling from my house’s landline.
“Answer it!” said Bronwyn.
“No, no, no, not a good idea,” I said, thinking it must be Miss Peregrine again, and I tried to hit MUTE but fumbled and accidentally answered the call.
“Crap!”
“Hello? Jacob?”
It was Horace, not Miss Peregrine. I put the call on speaker.
“Horace?”
“We’re all here,” said Millard.
“Oh, thank God,” Horace said. “I was afraid you were all dead!”
“What?” said Emma. “Why?”
“I, uh . . . never mind.”
He’d had a dream, clearly, but didn’t want to freak us out by describing it.
“Is that them?” I heard Olive say. “When are they coming back?”
“Never!” said Enoch, yelling into the phone.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Millard. “We’re driving now. We’ll be back as soon as we can. A few more days, at the most.”
It was a guess, but it would’ve been mine, too. How long could it take to find a peculiar at a high school, take her somewhere else, then drive home? A few days sounded reasonable.
“Listen,” said Horace. “Miss P is hopping mad. We tried to cover for you as long as we could, but Claire slipped up and told her the truth, and now she’s gunning for you. Absolutely livid.”
“Is that why you’re calling?” I said. “We knew she’d be mad.”
“Do me a favor,” said Horace. “If she asks, tell her we all told you not to do it, and you didn’t listen.”
“You better come home right away,” said Olive.
“We can’t,” said Bronwyn. “We’re on a mission.”
“When she finds out what we’ve been up to, I’m certain she’ll understand,” said Millard.
“I’m not so sure,” said Olive. “She turns a funny color whenever your names come up.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Out looking for you,” said another voice. “This is Hugh, incidentally.”
Now I was imagining them all crowded around the receiver in my parents’ room, listening with their heads together.
“Hi, Hugh,” said Emma. “Where’s Miss P looking for us?”
“She didn’t say. She just told us not to leave the house or we’d be grounded forever, then flew off.”
“Grounded, my buttock!” said Enoch. “You can’t let her treat you like babies.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Hugh. “You’re out there having adventures while we’re here with a steaming-mad headmistress. We got a four-hour lecture last night—which was meant for you—about responsibility and honor and trust and on and on until I thought my head would fall off.”
“It’s not all fun and games, you know,” said Bronwyn. “Adventuring is a real pain. We haven’t slept or showered or eaten properly since we left, and we nearly got shot in Florida and Enoch is starting to smell like a wet dog.”
Enoch sneered. “At least I don’t look like one.”
; “That still sounds better than being stuck here,” said Horace. “Anyway, please be safe and come back alive. And I realize this will sound strange, but in the process of your adventuring, please remember—Chinese restaurants good, Continental cuisine bad.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Emma.
“What is ‘Continental cuisine,’ even?” I said.
“It was part of a dream I had,” said Horace. “All I know is, it’s important.”
We said we would remember, and then Horace and Olive said goodbye. Before he hung up, Hugh asked us if we had heard anything about Fiona during our travels.
I looked at Emma, who looked as ashamed as I suddenly felt.
“Not yet,” Emma said. “But we’ll keep asking, Hugh. Everywhere we go.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “Thanks.” And he hung up.
I put the phone down. Emma turned and grimaced at the back seat.
“Don’t look at me that way,” said Enoch. “Fiona was a wonderful, sweet girl. But she is dead, and if Hugh can’t accept that, it isn’t our fault.”
“We should still have asked,” said Bronwyn. “We could have asked at the Flamingo hotel, and in Portal . . .”
“We’ll ask from now on,” I said. “And if it turns out she really is dead, at least we can say we did right by Hugh.”
“Agreed,” said Emma.
“Agreed,” said Bronwyn.
“Eh,” said Enoch.
“Shall we discuss our plan?” said Millard, who excelled at changing the subject when things got too emotional.
“Jolly good idea,” said Enoch. “I didn’t realize we had one.”
“We’re going to the school,” Bronwyn said. “To find a peculiar person who’s in danger, and help them.”
“That’s right. I forgot, we already have an excellent, detailed plan. What was I thinking?”
“I can tell now when you’re using sarcasm,” said Bronwyn. “And you are. Right?”
“Not at all!” Enoch said sarcastically. “It’ll be dead simple. We walk into this school we’ve never been to and ask everyone we meet, ‘Say, do you children know any peculiar people? Anyone around here manifest any peculiar abilities lately?’ And, sooner or later, we’ll find them.”