by Jeff Hirsch
“Authority. They’ve been lying to us for a hundred years. But that’s not important, what’s important is this” — he took a rattling breath — “on the other side of the border there are people like us, except for one thing — they live in a reality based on an entirely different set of rules.”
Something clicked into place as soon as he said it. Glenn had heard these words before. Read them before. She could see the web pages in her head as clear as day. The “divergent models” theory, if something so ridiculous could even be called a theory, was one of the most popular on Rifter websites. Glenn’s stomach turned. How could such nonsense be coming out of her own father’s mouth?
“Dad, wait — ”
“No, listen. I never told you this because … because it’s
complicated. Your mother didn’t leave us. Not like you think. She came here from the other side of the border and she had to go back.
That’s where she is now. That’s where she’s always been! I think she intended to go for just a little while, that’s why she didn’t say anything to us, but she … well, things are different there. She’s different there, and she was captured. Or trapped somehow. I know how it sounds, but”
— he turned to The Project — “none of that matters now. We can get her back. You and me, Glenny, we can rescue her. That’s what this project has always been about. She didn’t want to leave. She loved us more than anything and she wants to come home, but she can’t. She needs us to rescue her. And once we do, everything will be back the way it was. We’ll be back the way we were.”
Before Glenn could say anything, Dad was at The Project,
rummaging through clanking bits of metal.
“This is what I’ve been building. It finally works. This will allow us to go over to the other side but bring a bit of our reality — our rules — with us. Like … like a space suit.”
He grabbed Glenn’s arm and pushed a heavy band around her
wrist. Glenn lifted it up. It was a flat gray piece of metal with a glowing red jewel in the center.
“All we have to do is find her,” Dad said. “It won’t be easy. I know that. But once we bring her into our reality, she’ll be like she was when she was here and she’ll be able to leave with us. Then everything will be like it was. We’ll have her back, Glenn. Glenn? What are you doing?”
Glenn hissed as her fingernails scraped the skin underneath the bracelet. She ripped it off and threw it into the corner of the shed, where it landed with a crash. Icy air flooded the room as Glenn threw the bolt and opened the workshop door.
“No. Wait!”
Glenn whirled around. “There’s nothing there, Dad! Nothing!”
“Glenny — ”
“She’s not on the other side and she doesn’t need to be rescued!”
Glenn screamed. “She left because she didn’t want to be with us anymore. That’s all!”
Dad called after Glenn as she stormed out of the workshop, but she ignored him. She strode across the yard and back to the house, slamming doors all the way until she made it up to her room and shut herself inside.
The silence was awful. Glenn felt sick. She fell onto her bed and her body curled around the massive emptiness inside her. Glenn listened as her father stomped up the stairs and pounded on her door, but she didn’t move.
“Glenn?” he said, his voice shaking. She could tell he was crying.
“Glenny, please.”
Her father stood at her door for a time, his feet breaking the sliver of light beneath the door into three bars.
Glenn’s breath caught in her throat, but she said nothing. She didn’t move. After a while, there was a small sound, like a sigh, and her father’s footsteps shushed down the carpeted hall.
Glenn turned onto her back and stared at the blank ceiling.
Hopkins jumped up onto the bed and began to purr. Glenn snatched him up and pressed her fingertips into the soft white patch at his throat and then traced the angle of his face. She found the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear, the last vestige of the day they found him.
“What happened to him, Mommy?” Glenn had asked.
She was five years old and standing on their front porch.
Hopkins’s little body lay battered before her. “Was it a car?”
“No,” her mother said. “It was no car. Come on, Glenny.”
Mom wrapped Hopkins up in a towel and swept him into her
arms. After the local vet had done what he could, Glenn and her mother devoted weeks of near constant attention to nursing him back to health.
They kept his wounds clean and handfed him antibiotics and morsels of fish and chicken. Glenn held a medicine dropper over his mouth until his tongue emerged and he’d take water one drop at a time. She’d sneak down into the basement with her blanket and pillows and lie by his side, running her hand over his soft fur until he began to purr and they both fell asleep.
When he was strong enough to stand on his own, Glenn’s mom
bought him a blue ceramic food dish and placed it just beyond his bed of rumpled towels. Each night she would move the bowl a little farther away: across the room, out the door, down the hall. It broke Glenn’s heart to watch him struggle for it, but she knew he was getting stronger each time he moved away from his bed and bent his long neck to eat on his own. Finally the bowl ended up in Glenn’s room, and once he found it, he rarely left her side. He slept with his nose pressed against her cheek and his paws kneading her chest, his deep purr surrounding them like another blanket.
Once he had recovered, Glenn saw the name Gerard Manley
Hopkins printed on the spine of a book on her mother’s nightstand and liked the way it sounded in her head, musical and precise.
“You are Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she decreed, touching the tip of her finger to his small pink nose, as if she was knighting him.
It was the morning of her sixth birthday.
Ten years ago.
Glenn tried to resist what came next, but the memories had the quality of water — the harder she pushed away, the stronger they rushed back.
After Hopkins’s knighting, Mom had made Glenn’s favorite -
mushroom lasagna and garlic bread with a salad made of greens she had pulled from their garden that morning. Glenn sat across from her parents at the kitchen table, wearing a new bright yellow dress and blue sneakers that didn’t match but were her favorite that week.
Mom and Dad held hands under the table and kept up a steady chatter. Dad listened more than he talked, greedy for her mother’s every word.
Mom wore blue. It perfectly set off her ink-dark hair and pale skin, which were so like Glenn’s own.
“Daddy,” the younger Glenn said as they sat around the remains of her birthday dinner. “What did Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe do for you on your sixth birthday?”
“Well,” Dad said. “I worked in the coal mines all day — ”
“Dad!”
“- and then I was whipped soundly, given a bike, and sent to bed without supper.”
“Mom, why does Dad have to be so silly?” Glenn said in her very serious six-year-old way.
“I don’t think he can help it, dear. He’s what we adults call incorrigible.”
“What did you do on your sixth birthday?”
“I had a party,” Mom said brightly. “Just like yours.”
“Mom, why don’t we ever see your mom and dad like we see
Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe?”
Mom glanced across the table at Dad. “Because they live very far away,” she said.
“Will I ever go see them?”
Her mother’s hand, spread out on the white napkin by her plate, tensed slightly, then relaxed again. “Maybe,” she said, retreating from her chair to get more salad from the kitchen. “Maybe one day.”
Later that night, Mom lifted Glenn into her arms and glided up the stairs and down the hall, Hopkins following dutifully behind. Glenn dropped her head onto her mom’s shoulder and listene
d as she sang her familiar lullaby, a lilting song made up of nonsense words that rolled off her tongue.
She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over
Glenn’s, for one quiet moment, like a moon.
“Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan.”
The strange words drifted down from her mother’s lips,
whispered as light as falling snow.
“What does it mean, Mommy?”
Fingertips grazed Glenn’s cheek. “It means I love you. It means I’ll always love you.” She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. “No matter what.”
She stepped into the bright hallway and closed the door.
When Glenn woke the next morning, her mother was gone.
Glenn remembered the time as being like tumbling out of control down a long hill as images of the world assaulted her in disconnected jolts. The red of the Authority agents. Her father’s grief-stricken face.
The awful quiet of their house. Hopkins standing guard at the foot of her bed.
The search effort was called off after six months. And it was another six before Glenn and her father began to emerge from their grief, quiet and shaken, like newborns. It was years until Glenn realized that she had always sensed a distance in her mother, a vast expanse at her center that reached down to dark and unknowable depths. There were times when she laughed, chimelike and beautiful, followed by great stretches of gray silence. Glenn remembered all the times she found her staring blankly out into the forest with the haunted look of someone walking alone on a dark road, aching to glance behind her but terrified of what she might see.
Glenn knew that whatever had hold of her in those moments was what finally drove her away.
Was it possible, Glenn wondered, that the same madness had
returned to devour her father as well? And if that was true, was it crouched somewhere deep in Glenn’s genes too, biding its time?
After all, there were signs, weren’t there?
Ever since her mother had disappeared, Glenn had felt something stalking her, a shadow circling her in the darkness. From time to time it would draw close, testing her boundaries. Sitting in class, she’d feel a chill and hear a chorus of whispering voices. Or she’d step up onto a train platform and swear she saw some dark figure, huge and amorphous, moving just at the edge of her vision. How many times had she closed her eyes only to see the image of a woman in white turning to face her, her eyes like that of some awful bird of prey?
Glenn had never told Dr. Kapoor about any of this — he would have medicated her immediately, a black mark her DSS application never would have withstood — and for years she had been able to push those hauntings out of her mind, convincing herself that they were nothing but the bits and pieces of some old dream.
But what was harder to shake was the feeling that there was a message buried somewhere in those whispering voices and snatches of movement. And that if she were to surrender to them, if she invited them in, she would be able to unravel its meaning.
Glenn reached for her tablet, almost dropping it before she managed to turn the starlight projectors on. The night sky appeared above her, a winking lid of stars. She could isolate 813 with the computer, but sometimes, she thought, it was better to do it yourself.
She located Orion, then traced a path to the three blue-white stars that huddled together in a tight line to make up his belt. Alnitak.
Alnilam. Mintaka. From them she went up to Betelgeuse and down to Rigel. Found Taurus and Gemini. And then there it was. 813.
5
Glenn breathed in, then out.
The pounding inside her dulled. The whispering voices faded away. Her mother was gone. That had been true for ten years and had no more bearing on what was happening now than anything else that happened when she was six did.
Her father was sick. That was all that mattered. Before she left for the Academy, she would make sure that whatever it was that claimed her mother would not claim him too.
Glenn lifted her tablet and placed a call. Kevin looked stunned when he answered, but Glenn jumped in before he could say a word.
“I need to see your father,” she said.
Dr. Kapoor’s office was dim and quiet. The furniture looked antique, all of it polished to a dark sheen. Bookshelves filled with actual paper volumes surrounded them. Glenn sat, as she always did, deep in an overstuffed chair while Dr. Kapoor sat on the other side of a vast mahogany desk. He was nearly the opposite of Kevin, short and round with a wide face and soft brown eyes.
“He said he had made some sort of breakthrough?” Dr. Kapoor said in his well-modulated whisper after Glenn told him her story.
“Yes,” Glenn answered, twisting in her chair. “On his project.”
“That he’s been working on ever since your mother left.”
Glenn met his gentle but probing eyes, then looked down at the arm of the chair and picked at the brass rivets that held it together.
Dr. Kapoor shuffled the papers in front of him. “And he says this project will allow him to pass into this other world while bringing a piece of our reality with him. And in this way he’ll be able to rescue your mother from the other side of the border, where she’s trapped, presumably against her will.”
Something caught in Glenn’s throat, but she pushed it aside and nodded.
“Did you see any evidence that this was true?”
Glenn knew he was testing her. Seeing if she had been sucked in by her father’s delusion.
“No,” Glenn said. “Of course not.”
Dr. Kapoor leaned back from his desk and studied her, holding a silvery pen like a bridge between his two hands. “And how are you feeling, Glenn?”
In her mind, she saw a bird slowly turn its head until its black eyes rested on her. The shadow that moved through the trees was so close she could reach out and touch it.
“Glenn?”
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she said. “My dad needs help.
I want to know what you can do for him.”
Dr. Kapoor stared at her from across the desk, then dropped his pen on the table and sighed. “I’ll make a few calls,” he said. “But, Glenn — ”
Glenn didn’t wait for him to finish. She pulled herself out of her chair and made for the door. Unfortunately, Kevin was just outside. He popped up off the couch the second she opened the door.
“Glenn. Wait.”
“I’m going home, Kevin.”
Kevin shuffled along, trying to keep up. “Just a second.
Seriously.”
“I’ve got to go!”
Glenn threw the front door open. Her breath was coming fast and she could feel tears mounting. She didn’t want anyone, least of all Kevin, seeing her like that. She crossed their wide yard toward the train, and the next thing she knew, she was back in her bedroom.
It was dusk. Hopkins sat at the foot of her bed, staring at the closed door. Her little general. She hadn’t seen Dad when she’d gotten home, having slipped back into the house as carefully and quietly as she had done when leaving that morning on the way to school. Glenn guessed he was either in the workshop or his computer lab, though there were none of the usual sounds to confirm it. Part of Glenn ached to go out and see him. It’s what she always did when something was upsetting her, but she knew she couldn’t. Not this time. What would she say? What could she say?
Glenn dropped into bed and wrapped the blanket around her.
Hopkins abandoned his post and curled up next to her. Glenn ran her hand along his side until he turned over and she scratched at the white patch on his throat.
Glenn’s tablet pulsed blue. She scrambled for it in case it was Dr.
Kapoor but found Kevin’s smiling picture hovering in the corner of the screen instead. Glenn touched the image and declined the call, then lay back on the bed. She strained to hear a whisper of Dad working out in the shop, but it was as silent as could be. Did he know that she had gone to Dr. Kapoor? Surely it was imposs
ible, but she couldn’t shake the belief that he knew his own daughter had just betrayed him.
Glenn tried to bury herself in homework, tried to sleep, but it was no use. Even her stars brought her no comfort. Hopkins sniffed around her, curious. Glenn rubbed him under his chin.
“We’ll get this fixed,” Glenn said, pressing her forehead against his. “And then we’ll go. Just you and me. We’ll go and we’ll never come back.”
Hopkins slipped his forehead out from under hers and looked deeply into her eyes. Glenn stroked his forehead, then ran her thumb along the side of his face, down the length of his muzzle and over the prominent cheekbones that gave him a wise, ancient look. He eventually lay down beside her and slept, but Glenn couldn’t.
The vestiges of that half-forgotten dream had been hammering at her ever since she left Dr. Kapoor’s office. And now, as she lay exhausted and sleepless in the dark, the voices were sharper than ever, taunting her, insisting that if she would drop her years of resistance, if she would only remember, they would snap together and tell her …
what?
Finally the pressure was too much and she was too tired to fight any longer. Glenn could almost hear the crack as some wall within her fractured and that old dream emerged, fully formed, from the shadows.
“Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan.”
Those words still rang in six-year-old Glenn’s mind when she woke up hours after her mother had left. It was late. The house was silent. Hopkins was gone.
Glenn slid out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers, and pulled a robe over her pink and white pajamas. Still heavy with sleep, she shuffled out of her room into the dark hallway. She stopped when she hit the top of the stairs. Below her, the front door was hanging open, spilling the warmth and light of the house onto the leaf-covered yard.
“Hopkins?”
Glenn descended the stairs and stood in the open doorway. The yard spread out before her, plains of black and silvery blue in the moonlight. At the far end, near the edge of the forest, a woman in a long white nightgown stood with her back to Glenn.
“Mom?”
The woman took a step forward and disappeared into the trees.