by Katrina Leno
Ugh, long story and I’ll explain later but can you come over? And pretend like your mom is out of town and you’re sleeping over? But you can leave as soon as my dad’s gone.
Clare was a quick responder; she started typing right away, and Magpie held her phone in her hand, waiting for her response.
I’m bored out of my skull, sounds like a plan. What’s your address?
Magpie gave it to her, and Clare responded that she would be over in fifteen minutes.
Magpie showered slowly, turning up the water as hot as she could stand it.
When she got out, her skin was pink. She got dressed and stepped out the front door onto the stoop.
Her father was sitting in his truck, waiting. He was both closer and farther away than he had been in six months, and Magpie so acutely felt that disparity that it took her breath away.
He got out of his truck.
He looked as if he wanted to say something to her, but a car pulled up next to the curb, interrupting the moment. Clare jumped out of the passenger’s seat and waved her hand at her mom. Her mom waved back.
That simple exchange—that most normal of interactions—was enough to stab Magpie in the heart over and over again until she was sure she’d bleed to death before Clare reached the front door.
“So what’s the story?” Clare whispered.
“Your mom is out of town. We planned this a few days ago. My mom’s in the hospital.”
“Wait—what? Is she okay?”
“Not now,” Magpie said, because her father was walking toward them.
Clare smiled and turned around to greet him.
The smile was an expert smile, one pristinely crafted to fit a specific goal: fool a parent.
“Hi, Mr. Lewis,” Clare said, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Clare Brown.”
Magpie’s father took it. He looked happy to have something to hold on to even for just a moment.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise. Hey, thanks for being okay with this. My mom is out of town and my aunt—that’s who just dropped me off—well, she’s got a newborn and twin toddlers, so it’s basically, like, rock-concert levels of noise all night long, you know? So when Mags told me what happened to Mrs. Lewis, well, I’m just glad I can be here for her.” She shifted her overnight bag from one arm to the other; Magpie thought this was a nice touch.
“Of course,” Magpie’s father said, and she watched him relax visibly into the intricate lie Clare had just told. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you!” Clare said, and then she had the good sense to not add Magpie’s told me so much about you because, of course, Magpie had not.
“Well—call me, all right? If you two need anything. Anything at all. Get spooked or want pizza or… Here, actually.”
Magpie’s father took two twenty-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to his daughter. Magpie closed her fist around them and tried not to let her skin touch her father’s skin.
“Don’t spend that on booze, okay?” he said, his voice shaky, his joke missing the mark by eighty-seven miles, approximately.
“Thanks, Mr. Lewis,” Clare said.
“I’ll be home. All right, Magpie? I’ll be home if you need anything.”
Magpie’s father walked to his truck and got inside and drove away, and the two girls watched until it turned a corner, then Clare turned to Magpie, and said, “Magpie?”
“It’s just an old nickname,” Magpie said, forcing a smile. “Thank you so much for doing this, you can leave whenever. Here.”
She tried to hand Clare one of the twenty-dollar bills, but Clare pushed it away. “What are you talking about? I’m staying over, and we’re ordering pizza. Come on, Magpie.”
Magpie followed Clare into the house, her heart beating an uncomfortable, pounding beat against her ribs. The house was disgusting; nobody had dusted a shelf or mopped a floor in six months.
Clare paused just inside the living room, and Magpie knew she must have seen it, the wealth of filth that had collected on every surface, the neglect and misuse that had settled over the house like a film.
But far from making fun of it, far from calling attention to it, Clare turned around and looked Magpie dead in the eyes, and said, “What happened to your mom?”
“Oh,” Magpie said, and although everything inside her was urging her to lie, to make something up, to run and hide, she made herself clear her throat and tell the truth. It was her truth to tell, and she would tell it when she wanted to. “She drank too much. Way too much. I think… I think she almost died.”
“Jesus,” Clare said, and she put her hand on Magpie’s arm, and Magpie learned that Clare’s hands were warm and soft and surprisingly strong. “I am so sorry.” She paused and nodded to the front of the house. “He doesn’t live with you guys anymore? Your dad?”
“No,” Magpie said. “But I’m sure you know why.”
Clare looked confused. “No idea.”
“You haven’t heard anything about it?”
“Nope. But even if I had—I’m well aware that you can’t believe everything you hear. I mean, people actually think my father shot himself. In our garage!” She rolled her eyes, and Magpie felt her face go hot. “It makes no sense to me, because anyone can just search his name and…” Clare mimicked fingers on a keyboard, then she caught sight of Magpie’s face and stopped. “Oh, crap. That’s what you thought, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” Magpie said. “I’m such a hypocrite, Clare, I—”
“It’s fine, honestly,” Clare insisted. She took a deep breath, looked around the living room, decided something. “He took pills,” she continued in a small voice. “And not in our garage. He rented a hotel room. Told my mom he had a business trip, but he was really just a few miles away. I guess I’m glad he did it there instead of in our house. And no, we didn’t move, either. That’s our same house we’ve always lived in.”
“I’m really sorry,” Magpie said. “I had no idea.”
Clare shrugged, and said, “It’s all right. Should we order the pizza?”
Magpie got the phone number from a menu in the kitchen and dialed as Clare put her overnight bag down on the couch and looked out the back door.
“You have a pool? I wish you told me; I would have brought my suit.”
“You can borrow one of mine,” Magpie said, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. “What do you like on your pizza?”
“Cheese, eggplant, mushrooms, olives, whatever,” Clare said. “I’m starving. Where’s the bathroom?”
Magpie pointed down the hall, and Clare went off in search of it.
She finished ordering the pizza and hung up the phone.
She should have gone to see her mother today, she shouldn’t have been so foolish to think that nobody would come looking for her, a sixteen-year-old with terrible decision-making capabilities alone in a house without supervision.
But this was much better.
Clare, pizza…
This was infinitely preferable to hospital lighting, the harsh way it cut right into your skin, the smell of rubbing alcohol and blanched food sticking to your clothes like smoke.
And here was a weird thing: Even though she hadn’t even been thinking about it, even though she had succeeded in pushing it to the farthest corner of her brain, even though she had written it off as a thing that had never happened, as a thing that was impossible and made up in her head, she somehow knew.
The shed light was on and she ought to show Clare.
She ought to bring Clare out to the backyard and show her all the beautiful things there were in the world if only you knew where to look for them.
Magpie heard a shuffle from behind her.
“Hey, what bathing suit can I borrow?” Clare asked.
With immense concentration, Magpie pulled herself away from the window. “I’ll get one,” she said. She went into her room and found one of her smaller suits, something she thought would fit Clare
.
“When did they say the pizza will get here?” Clare asked from the doorway.
“Like, fifteen minutes.” Magpie tossed the bathing suit to Clare. “I should put some chemicals in the pool. They’re in the shed.”
Her voice was not her voice. Her voice was that of a person who sounded almost exactly like her. Clare would never be able to tell.
“Oh, okay,” Clare said, shrugging. “Want me to come with you?”
“Sure.”
They went outside.
It had gotten dark.
The night was unnaturally quiet, pierced not even by the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of flies. The pool water was still and dark blue, reflecting the sky above it. Magpie dipped her hand into it as they passed. Not too hot. Not too cold.
Neither was Magpie too hot nor too cold; instead, she felt exactly right. Exactly the perfect temperature and exactly perfect in every other conceivable way: This was what she was supposed to be doing in the moment she was supposed to be doing it. There are so few times in one’s life when this happens that she wished she could pause and enjoy it for a little while, but she had things to do and she couldn’t put them off.
“Someone left the light on,” Clare observed of the shed. When they got closer, Magpie could see one large white moth beating its wings against the glass pane of a high window, trying to get in.
Magpie moved her body in front of the padlock so Clare wouldn’t see the impossible way it slid off into her hand, the way it opened without being opened, the way it responded to Magpie’s unspoken command.
She pulled open the door, and it did not creak or otherwise protest.
She could see the two worlds contained in the shed, and a glance back at Clare revealed that Clare, too, was seeing something impossible, the doubleness of the shed, the way the shed was both here and someplace else.
“Mags,” Clare whispered, and her voice sounded scared, but she didn’t run away.
“It’s okay,” Magpie said. “I’ve been here before.”
And in that moment she remembered everything, and she had really done it, and Near was real, and she would show them all now—she would show them just what she was capable of.
FOUR FOR A BOY
If you give a name to an impossible thing, does it make the impossible thing any less impossible?
Magpie thought so, and she had named this place before she had even come here, and she had called it Near and wrote down its details in a bright-yellow notebook, and it was real, and it was right in front of them, spreading out so far in every direction that there was no room left for doubt in her mind that she had left her neighborhood in Farther, New England, the World, and traveled somewhere else entirely. Somewhere near. Somewhere Near.
Another world, another place, another plane of existence, she couldn’t say for sure. It also didn’t seem that important.
Next to her, Clare vomited noisily into the plush lime-green grass that covered the hillside they’d found themselves on.
They’d taken a few steps away from the shed, and they were entirely in Near, on a grassy hillside, but Magpie could still see pieces of her world in a shed that was translucent and both there and not there: an old pair of roller skates, a wicker chair, a crack of darkness that she thought might be the door of the shed left ajar and open to the nighttime of her world.
This world was bright and sunny, a cheerful yellow sun high and floating in a blue sky. Puffs of clean white clouds. Down the hillside, a half hour’s walk or so, Magpie could see a small town. Blue and white and yellow houses all surrounded by a clean line of fencing.
Picturesque, Magpie thought. That was the only word for it.
“Are you okay?” she asked Clare, meaning something closer to Are you almost done? Because she could not stand the wet, sloppy sound of vomit hitting grass. It reminded her too much of her mother, and this place could not be tarnished with the memory of Ann Marie.
Clare sat back, kneeling, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
“What the fuck just happened?” she asked, her voice shaky and cold. “What is this place? Where’s your backyard? Where’s the shed?”
But then she saw it, and she sat up straighter, and Magpie knew Clare was trying to explain the existence of the shed in this world, how it clearly didn’t belong here and yet was so obviously there. The thereness of it was unmistakable. And everything else was inside of it. An entire world tumbling out of it. Clare’s eyes looked wildly around at the sky, at the grass, at the not-there-but-there shed and finally landed on Magpie, holding on to the only thing she knew.
“I’ve been here before, but I didn’t remember,” Magpie said. Her own voice was calm and even. “I remember now.”
“You’ve been here? What is this place?” Clare asked, hugging her own body with her arms, pulling herself together in a tight embrace.
“Can’t you see?” Magpie asked, and nodded her head in the direction of the town, the only small cluster of buildings within sight, surrounded on every side by miles and miles and miles of undisturbed grass stretching unblemished to the horizon.
Clare looked. She shielded her eyes with her hand.
“See what?” she asked after a moment. “It’s just a town.”
“I know,” Magpie said.
“I don’t want to go down there.”
“But can’t you see what it is?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t want to go down there,” Clare repeated softly. Her breathing was ragged, uneven. Her eyes grew wider.
Magpie softened; she realized she was being a jerk. Her own smug excitement at being back in Near—at remembering! at it being real!—was so overwhelming to her that she’d forgotten feeling exactly like Clare did now the first time she’d stepped foot in the shed.
Through the shed.
Clare sat on the grass again, her legs bent, and placed her head between her knees. She took deep, gulping breaths that shook the air around her. She started to cry.
Magpie knelt in front of her. “Clare, are you okay? Are you okay? I’m so sorry. I would have warned you, but I didn’t remember. I promise I didn’t remember until now. I’ve been here, but it’s like… It’s like I lost it all. Are you hurt?”
Clare composed herself enough to lift her head a little. Her mascara was smeared down her cheeks; she was crying hard now, her shoulders heaving in time to her ragged breaths.
“Anxiety,” she whispered, the word thin and scratchy. “Anxiety attack. Just… give me a minute.”
Magpie put her hands on Clare’s knees as Clare lowered her head again.
They stayed like that for a long time, Clare crying and breathing, and Magpie with her hands on Clare’s knees, squeezing and rubbing them, hoping she was doing enough.
Eventually, Clare’s breathing evened out. She raised her head and wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands.
“I haven’t had one of those in a long time.”
“I’m sorry,” Magpie said.
“You didn’t remember? You didn’t remember this was here?”
“No. Not until I got here.”
“Okay,” Clare replied. “I believe you.”
Clare ran her hands through her hair, took a few more deep breaths, then looked around again at the world they’d entered.
“It’s still here,” she said. “I thought I might be dreaming, but I’ve never had a panic attack in my dreams.”
“It’s real,” Magpie said. “I’ve been here before. The shed, it’s some kind of… doorway.”
Clare looked back at the shed, transparent and strange in the bright sun of this new place. She nodded her head slowly. “So what’s that town?”
“I haven’t gone down yet. I couldn’t work up my nerve to get any closer,” Magpie admitted. Then, as if she were revealing the biggest secret she had ever locked away inside her heart (and she was, she was), she added, “It’s called Near.”
“Near,” Clare said, trying the word out on her tongue. “Wait—if yo
u’ve never been down there, how do you know what it’s called?”
“I just know,” she whispered.
“What do you mean, you just know?”
“I can’t explain it,” Magpie said. It was easier than telling Clare about the notebook. It was easier than trying to explain that she had made this place. That she had named it. She had probably said too much already. She watched Clare carefully, studied her, and that’s how she saw the moment Clare decided that she didn’t really have any choice but to trust Magpie. Clare was a trusting individual, kind and eager to believe the best in people. Magpie put a hand on her knee again.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better,” Clare said, nodding slowly. She pulled herself to her feet, then offered Magpie a hand.
When they were both standing, Clare turned to look at the place where the garden shed still stood, still translucent, still impossible.
“We should go back,” she said.
“I think we should get a closer look. Now that there are two of us.”
Clare looked down at the town. “There’s something about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something… familiar.”
Magpie knew the answer, of course; she had known it because she had made it, but it had slithered to someplace deep in her brain, someplace hidden and dark, and she could only remember it now, as if being here again had dug the truth out of her.
“We could just go a little closer,” she suggested. “Just to see.”
Clare’s eyes darted to the shed. “Do you think it will stay there? Or do you think it will go away?”
“If we go down there?”
“Yeah,” Clare said, and she looked back to the town, to the place that lived both inside Magpie’s heart and now, somehow, all around them.
“I think it will. Don’t you just… feel like it will?”
Clare considered. She took a long, slow breath. “Are you sure?”
“We’ve come all this way,” Magpie said, even though all this way was only one single step into a shed that unlocked itself at Magpie’s touch. “I think it will stay.”