by Dawn Napier
"Yeah!" The cow and horse bounced up and down. "We'll go hide, and you gotta find us."
The girl and bunny hid their faces in Megan's lap while she closed her eyes and counted to twenty. "Ready or not, here I come!" they shouted.
Megan crawled all over the bedroom with the bunny in one hand and the farmer girl in the other. This was sort of fun. She rarely played with the kids like this; since they played so well together, they'd never seemed to need her as a playmate. She'd been missing out.
She found the cow face-down inside Magic Mindy's Dream Castle. "Found you!" the bunny crowed.
"You won't find Horse so easily," the cow said. "He's hidden super-good."
"We'll see about that," said the farmer girl. Again Megan made a circuit of the room, slower this time. There was clutter everywhere, much of it big enough to conceal a small wooden horse.
Behind the game, Megan's adult mind was picking apart what Jenna had said about the "real mommy." Did Jenna actually know something about her and Paige's biological mother? Had Sarah been writing to them? Brian would have found and intercepted any letters. Or was it just a subconscious fear? Jenna was old enough to remember Sarah and how they'd lived before the police came and took them away. She could just be afraid of what might have happened, and let her imagination do the rest.
Well, the police were searching for Sarah now, so they'd know the truth sooner or later.
After three or four trips around the room, Megan gave up. "All right Horse, you win the game," the bunny announced. "Ollie-ollie-all's-in-free!"
"I knew you wouldn't find him," the cow gloated. "Because he's not in the real world anymore, that's why."
"Where is he?"
"He's in Far-Faraway!"
Of course. Megan felt like she'd been waiting for that very answer. "And how do you get to Far-Faraway?"
"Out the window. Like Auntie Debbie and Paige."
Megan looked out of the window. It was open just the tiniest crack, and tucked between the window and the screen was Horse. "How did you get the window open?" she asked. Her heart thudded in her ears.
"I just opened it."
"But it was locked." Megan looked down at her daughter and then up at the latch at the top of the window frame, which was easily two feet above her daughter’s reach. Her little rocking chair could have helped her reach it, but that was on the other side of the room. Megan would have heard her drag it across the floor.
"I don't know. Magic, I guess. What do you want to play now?"
"I think that Mommy needs to lie down now. I'm feeling a bit tired." Jenna shrugged and went back to her toys as Megan wandered out of the room.
Megan went back to her bedroom feeling weird and off-kilter. Maybe if she could lie down on her bed for a few minutes, the world would stop spinning and making her want to puke.
Seems like all I do is lie in this damn bed, Megan thought as she dropped her head down onto her pillow. There's got to be a better way of dealing with stress. Her coping mechanism as a child had been to make up a story about Jack Benimble. But since Jack was part of her problem, she didn't think that would work this time.
Then again, it was worth a try. Megan sat up. Maybe she could write a story about what was happening to her now and give it a happy ending. It might make her feel better. She remembered using her stories as a crude sort of wish fulfillment when she was stressed or lonely as a child. It had always made her feel better, more in control of what was happening.
Megan got up and went to the PC snuggled in the corner of the bedroom. She hated having the damn thing in here—Brian always stayed up late playing those shooting and killing games of his—but right now it was a blessing. She didn't want to be near Brian right now, and she was still feeling dizzy enough to want her bed close by.
She turned on the machine and waited for it to boot up. The icon for the web browser appeared first, and Megan's mouse cursor hovered over it temptingly. Megan frowned at her mouse hand and moved the cursor to the word processor. This was no time to go surfing. Email and social networks could wait until she had a better grip on what was going on inside her own head. And if she was really stupid—or just unlucky—she'd end up reading a bunch of statistics about the survival rate of kidnapped children. Megan already knew enough to be frightened. She didn't need to end up out of her mind with panic again. Megan opened the word crunching program and put her hands on the keyboard. Let's do this, she thought. It can’t hurt.
An hour later, Megan stared at a blank screen and wept silently.
She couldn't do it. She'd lost the knack. She'd tried over and over again to conjure Jack Benimble in her mind and make him do what she wanted, but she'd failed. Every sentence she'd written was stiff, clumsy, and fake. It felt gross to her, like mental necrophilia.
God, what happened to me? How did I turn out this way, so dull and fake?
Jack was gone forever, and so was her daughter. Megan was powerless. She had to face facts: she wasn't eight years old anymore, hiding in her closet with a sketch pad and a flashlight.
Wait a minute, she stopped herself. Maybe that was what she was doing wrong.
Megan shut down the computer. When she was eight, computers were clunky, expensive machines. Her family hadn't even owned one until she was in high school, and she'd been forbidden to touch it. Of course she wasn’t going to get back down the rabbit hole with this sleek, modern machine.
Megan had no drawing paper, but she did have an enormous stack of ditto sheets shoved into the drawer beneath the computer—school work that the girls had brought home. Most of the sheets were one-sided: a terrible waste of paper in Megan's opinion, but a blessing this time. She riffled through the stack and in two minutes had two dozen sheets of drawing paper.
The girls' art supplies were in a drawer in Jenna's bedroom. When Megan went back there, Jenna had all the farm animals standing in a circle around the barn. It looked like a bizarre druidic ritual. Megan shivered a little. "What are they doing?" she asked her daughter.
"Watching."
"Watching for what?"
"Watching for Professor Chicken to come tell them what to do."
"I see." Megan wondered if this was a good opening to try and get more information out of her, but then she shook her head. She was too damn tired, and anyway, it felt like she'd gotten as much out of Jenna as she was ever going to. The paper in her hands was already starting to talk to her, and she felt that familiar itch on the back of her neck, right at the base of her skull. She wanted to write; she felt the need in a way she hadn't when she was staring at the blank, soulless screen of the computer.
She found a box of the basic ten colors that looked fairly intact. That was all she would need. She had always stuck to bold, simple colors when she was telling her stories to Debbie, and she needed to re-create that same energy now.
Back to her bedroom, and straight to the walk-in closet she and Brian shared. For once, she was grateful for Brian's childlike addiction to clutter. The dropped clothes and scattered CD-ROM disks made it feel more cozy, more like a child's closet. But it was still missing something.
Of course. Megan pulled the rosy-pink comforter off the bed and dragged it into the closet. She kicked, pushed, and pummeled the comforter into something resembling a squirrel's nest. Then she gathered up her paper and crayons, found an old coffee table book she could use as a lap desk, and settled in.
There was nothing soulless or blank about the paper in her hands. Rather, it was pure potential, like the sort of quantum universes that astrophysicists talked about. There might be an elephant, a planet, or an undiscovered species here. It could be anything at all.
Start with Jack, Megan thought.
She drew Jack Benimble as he had been in the coffee shop: bright motley, with black bells. Why the black bells? Was that some sort of clue, a bit of symbolism, or nothing at all?
Never mind. Just draw. Megan was amused to observe that her drawing skills hadn't improved much since she was a child. That was all rig
ht. Getting back into a childlike mindset would be easier than she thought.
On the next page, she wrote in ragged longhand, "Once upon a time there lived two girls and their friend Jack. Jack made magic happen, and he made them feel good when things at home were sad and scarey."
"Scarey." Megan started to correct the typo, but she changed her mind. That was the sort of mistake a child would make.
The crayon felt warm under her hand as she continued. "One little girl was tall and pretty, and the other little girl was shorter and smarter. They loved each other very much, and they loved their good friend Jack."
Oh, she felt it now; how could she have forgotten this feeling? The warmth spreading through her brain, like a river of molten gold. It felt like dreaming, but it was alive and conscious and real. When was the last time she'd written anything? Before or after she'd gotten custody of her girls? Megan was angry with herself for neglecting this wonderful gift for so long.
She drew the two little girls: one tall and gawky like herself, the other short and chubby like Debbie. They had identical brown hair and hazel-green eyes. Around them she drew brown shapes that could be dogs or bears. She decided that they were dogs.
"One day the girls asked Jack to take them to the Island of Dogs, where all dogs could run free and not be on leashes or get put to sleep because nobody wanted them. So he jingled his magic bells, and they were taken away through the sky to a beautiful island full of wonderful dogs. The dogs were happy to see them, and they licked their faces with pink tongues."
The crayon was hot in her hand, but Megan's hand clamped down and would not let go. It hurt, but it still felt good. She went on. "But then one day an evil wizard came to the islands, and all the dogs ran away to hide. The evil wizard laughed and laughed…"
The crayon in her hand was so hot that Megan thought it might melt. But it stayed strong, and the words poured out of her hand.
It's back! she exulted. I can feel it! I remember now, I remember how to do this!
Why did I ever stop?
Along with the pleasure, though, Megan felt a trace of fear. Of what? She didn't know. She felt apprehensive, as though something had happened or might happen or maybe she just thought it could happen—Megan didn't know this either. But she ignored the fear in favor of the delight she took in her story. One dog was grey and had a pointed snout and blue eyes. Megan shivered when she looked at the blue blobs of its eyes. Faintly, she heard a snarl. That wasn't a friendly dog, she felt. That was not a dog who would run from the evil wizard.
There was a black smudge in the middle of the paper. Megan frowned and touched it, and the smudge expanded to cover the entire paper. It felt cold. She touched it again, and her hand disappeared. Megan yelped and pulled her hand back, but the world was tilting, tipping her forward, and Megan fell through the black smudge that was no smudge at all, but a hole, and Megan fell, she fell through the hole in the paper.
Chapter Six
Megan was on her hands and knees in the mud, and cold rain poured down and dripped through her hair. She pulled her hands out of the squelching muck and tried to look around. The rain was heavy and cold, and her eyes were filled with water. She wiped her muddy hands off on her T shirt, used a relatively clean sleeve to wipe her eyes, and tried again.
The world around her was gloomy, and cold rain poured into her hair and eyes and mouth. She couldn't tell if it was day or night; the sky was a grey-smudge twilight between the two. She stood on a narrow beach next to an expanse of water so wide that she couldn't see the other side. Actually, she couldn't see more than a dozen meters out because of the rain. She sniffed, and under the dirty-mud smell she caught a whiff of salt. The land beyond the beach was thick with trees, and she could not see into the darkness. Megan looked straight up, and her eyes stung with sharp, cold rain. There were no answers there.
I fell through the paper, she thought. But this didn’t look much like her picture. She hadn't drawn any rain, just the two little girls and—
A low growl interrupted her thoughts.
The dogs came out of the forest together, moving as a single unit. Every breed and type of dog imaginable stalked slowly out of the trees with their heads lowered and their hackles raised in wet spikes. They all had stiff tails and bared teeth, and they all looked at her with wild, hungry eyes.
They were feral, Megan realized. They weren't wolves; they were dogs, but they had never known the inside of a human being's home. They all had ragged, unkempt coats covering jutting ribs. She saw a Shih Tzu so matted with knots and filth that it could barely walk. It struggled along through the wet muck and snarled in a way that would have been funny if it weren't so pathetic.
The Shih Tzu reminded her of something awful, a sharp childhood pain. It was the sort of feeling she got when she was reminded of something so painful that she'd forced herself to forget. There were a few such land mines in Megan's memory. This one was less frightening than sad.
After their parents' divorce, Megan and Debbie's mother had tried to make them feel better by adopting a dog. She'd gone to the pound and picked out a ragged four-year-old Shih Tzu that she was told was good with kids. But the dog was a disaster. It had been abused and neglected so badly that it barely let anyone pet it, and it had pottied in the house constantly. Mom finally had had to give it back to the pound after it bit Debbie on the ankle for brushing past its food bowl.
Larry, Megan thought. The dog's name was Larry.
Debbie had cried for days after Larry went back to the pound. The little dog had been a bad-tempered little shit machine, but still the girl had mourned his loss like a death in the family. That was Debbie all over, Megan knew. Even after it bit her, she’d wanted to give it another chance. Megan stared at the mangy, growling array of dogs and thought, She would want to adopt all of you. Take you home and clean you up and try to make you love her. Even if you tore her apart she'd want you to have another chance.
Their bodies were nothing but skin and sticks, and their collarless necks were long and gaunt. The Dobermans were the worst. Their ribs jutted out of their sides, their eyes were sunken in their sockets, and their tongues lolled greedily at the scent of fresh meat. They had no idea that she was supposedly a god to their kind. They had never seen a person before in their lives. They did not see a friend or a master; they saw a meal.
Megan thought back to Bull, the Dobie that had lived down the street from her years ago. He'd spent his entire life tied up in the back yard of that ill-kept, filthy house. Megan had lived in fear of the day that he would eventually break the ancient rope and go on a killing spree. Once she had walked home from school late in the evening, and the dog had lunged at her hard enough to shake the tree it was tied to. Megan had run the rest of the way home and cried in her room until suppertime.
Bull had disappeared one day, and the neighbors had never gotten another dog. Megan didn't know what had happened to him. She felt sorry for the dog's unfortunate, neglected life, but her pity did not mitigate her fear. These dogs were what Bull could have become, had he been starved and beaten for a year or two and then turned loose.
At least there was no sign of the blue-eyed wolf. The one from her stories that Debbie had been so afraid of. Not yet. Maybe he was hiding.
Megan was pinned against the ocean. They were on all sides of her, slowly stalking, beginning to growl deep in their throats, and she had no place to go.
It's like Jupiter, she thought. I know too much about how the world works, and I know that domesticated dogs left alone on an island won't be happy, idyllic little puffballs. Fuck adulthood. Fuck it right in the ear.
Megan slipped off her loafers and held one in each hand. A gaunt, black-tongued Great Dane was getting very close to her. She could hear him sniffing, tasting her on the air. The rain still poured, and perhaps it had dampened their senses. That could be why they hadn’t yet attacked.
She raised both hands slowly and flung her shoes in two different directions, over the dogs' heads. "Go get it, boy
s!" she shouted. The dogs flinched and looked around, and in their moment of distraction Megan spun around and dove into the water. It deepened almost immediately, and Megan paddled away from the island as fast as she could. The water was bone-chillingly cold, but swimming fast and hard would keep her warm. She knew that it would. She knew it.
She heard the dogs barking behind her, but she also knew that they wouldn’t follow her into the sea. They were dogs, and they lived only on the Island of Dogs. Obviously, they would never go anywhere else. That was just how things worked here.
The rained eased up as she swam away, and the sun overhead was warm. Megan was almost comfortable in the water now. It felt like a warm, salty bath. She remembered how much she'd loved swimming in the ocean as a child, when they'd gone to visit Auntie Candace and their cousins. Every year she, Debbie, and their parents had taken the trip to Florida for an annual family visit. Two days with the family, one day at Disney World, and three days on the beach was the standard routine. Auntie Candace had been a nice lady, and their cousins Joey and Tracy hadn't been too terribly annoying. But the days on the beach were the best part of every trip. Warm sand, hot sun, and the feeling that one would never be cold again. And the water! Miles and miles of it, like a blank canvas begging to be painted. Mom had been a worrywart about letting her go out too far, but Megan had never gotten too tired to swim back to shore. Megan had never gotten tired of swimming at all, in fact, and likely she never would.
She rolled onto her back and floated a while, enjoying the warm sun on her wet body. The sun energized her. She could swim as far as she needed to in this warm ocean bath.
God, she missed Florida. Maybe they could take another trip down there once she'd gotten Paige back. Aunt Candace was gone, dead of uterine cancer for ten years now, and the cousins had scattered to more urban locations in search of jobs and education. But the beach was still there. Disney World was still there. Why had they stopped going? The trips had ended when she was eleven and Debbie was nine. Why was that?