by Renee Duke
“When I was about your age. The experience changed me completely.”
Mr. Marchand nodded “Yeah, up until then she was an ordinary, everyday kid.”
“Everyone is ordinary until they embrace the extraordinary, Alan”. She looked past him and waved. “Oh, there’s Reg. I have to go. See you soon.”
“Loopy,” Mr. Marchand muttered as she hurried off. “Definitely loopy.”
“But not until she was my age?” Paige queried.
“So my sisters claim. They’ve always said they got along fine with her when she was younger. Then the teenage hormones kicked in and, Bam! A whack job.” He looked at her suspiciously. “Not starting to feel similarly strange yourself, are you?”
“Uh, no,” she assured him. “Why? You don’t think it’s hereditary, do you?” she added in alarm.
Her father laughed. “No. Just trying to bug you. I’m pretty sure Bev’s a one-off.”
Having checked their bags, they went through security and into the departure lounge. Because Jack’s surname was not the same as theirs, Mrs. Marchand had to show their letter of authority at every check-point. One official even asked him if they were indeed his aunt and uncle.
He nodded, and then softly added, “For now.”
“For always,” Paige declared, squeezing his hand.
She and Dane did their best to cheer him up, but despite the departure lounge’s numerous diversions, the two hours they had to spend there while waiting for their flight to board seemed interminable. The flight itself wasn’t pleasant, either. The travel bands that usually kept Jack’s motion sickness at bay failed him on this occasion, resulting in several violent bouts. He also experienced considerable ear pain during both the take-off and the landing. Knowing he was subject to this problem, his mother had supplied him with a large quantity of sucking sweets to help mitigate it, but, like the bands, they had little effect. Mr. Marchand’s older brother Neil was waiting for them in Vancouver, and by the time they had cleared Customs and followed him out to his van, everyone was feeling drained.
Over the next couple of days, however, Jack began to feel physically and emotionally better. Of the three children, he was—aside from his renowned early morning grouchiness—usually the most positive in his outlook, certain that if he gave it enough thought, there was a solution to every problem, or, failing that, a stroke of good fortune to render it void. He still had nightmares every night, though, and seemed to have transmitted the inclination to Paige and Dane.
Like him, neither could remember anything too specific upon wakening.
“I was doing a lot of running in mine,” said Paige. “Something bad was after me, but I don’t know what.”
Dane nodded. “I was trapped and couldn’t run, but the something bad feeling was there. I guess we’re picking up on Jack’s vibes. Unless jet lag’s just found a new way of getting to us. The only one it never seems to affect is Dad.”
Paige and Dane’s three oldest cousins were too busy with summer jobs to be home much, but the girls’ brother Brett, who was a few months older than Paige, spent a lot of time with them, and gave Dane some tips on adjusting to the contact lenses his mother finally procured for him.
Brett was especially friendly to Jack, and Jack liked him, too. He also liked Uncle Neil and Aunt Janine. Apprised of his circumstances, they went out of their way to make him feel welcome and kept all the children busy with such end-of-summer activities as shopping for school supplies and taking in the Pacific National Exhibition, less formerly known as the PNE.
“You should stay another day,” Uncle Neil told Mr. Marchand the night before they were due to go home. “I know you’re anxious about your house, but the latest newscasts say the Okanagan rainstorms are abating.”
“Might be abating,” his brother corrected. “They also said local creeks are reaching dangerous levels. That makes our place vulnerable to flooding. Other places, too. There’s even been talk of some schools not opening on time.” He looked at his children and grinned. “A prospect that probably bothers parents more than it does kids.”
The Marchands had left their car with Uncle Neil. Wanting to get ahead of the long week-end traffic, they set out for Kelowna early the next morning. Since his body clock was out of whack from jet lag anyway, Jack did not object to getting up at what he might otherwise have considered an unreasonable hour.
“With luck your bands will work for the car and you’ll be able to enjoy the drive,” said Mrs. Marchand. “Some parts of the Coquihalla Highway are quite picturesque.”
“And others are really boring,” Paige contributed, having traversed it many times. “Besides, it takes hours.”
Her father snorted. “Yeah—four. Five, tops. Big deal. To employ the old, ‘when I was your age’ thing, the Hope-Princeton Highway used to take eight. Count yourselves lucky and rejoice that the Coq was built.”
To everyone’s relief, Jack’s travel bands did work and he was able to take an interest in the journey.
“Those mountains are a lot farther away than they look,” he commented as the car sped along the flatlands near Abbotsford. “We’ve been travelling towards them for ages.”
“We’ll get to them eventually,” said Paige, “and then you’ll wonder if they’re ever going to end. Once we get past Chilliwack, we’ll start going up into them.”
“Will that make my ears hurt as much as they did on the plane?” Jack asked fearfully.
“Mountain ascents and descents are more gradual,” said Mrs. Marchand. “Your sweets should do the trick.”
The sweets definitely helped, but no one’s ears popped satisfactorily until they had gone through the snowshed.
“Why was there a tunnel back there?” asked Jack. “It wasn’t going through the mountain or anything. It was just over a section of the motorway. What’s the point?”
“Avalanche protection,” Dane replied. “Snowsheds protect roads in areas that are at high-risk for avalanches. That one’s called the Great Bear Snowshed.”
“Oh? Are there bears around here, then?
“It’s Canada,” said Paige. “There are bears everywhere. Including the outskirts of Kelowna. Cougars, too.” She grinned. “You’ll have to be careful, won’t you?”
Her mother frowned. “Stop teasing him, Paige. You know very well the most he’s likely to see around our neighbourhood is a coyote or a raccoon.”
“Both of which can be quite aggressive,” said Paige. “Especially the raccoons. And especially mother raccoons with babies.”
“That goes for any species,” said Mr. Marchand. “Paige is just trying to scare you, Jack. Ignore her.”
On the other side of Merritt, Jack noticed a long dirt road going up the side of a mountain.
“Who’d want to live up a steep hill like that?” he wanted to know.
Mrs. Marchand smiled. “No one. That road doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s a run-off. Run-offs are for emergencies—such as the brakes failing on a big lorry. The driver can turn into one of those and bring his rig to a halt before he loses control and goes off the motorway which, on one side, is quite a drop.”
“Strewth,” said Jack, employing an expression he had picked up from a Victorian street urchin. Then he shook his head. “Bears, cougars, tunnels to keep back avalanches, and now roads to stop people plummeting into ravines. Outside of cities, your country seems rather barbarous.”
Mrs. Marchand laughed. “Not favourably impressed with your first visit, then?”
Jack started to remind her it wasn’t his first visit, but trailed off, realizing that, in Mrs. Marchand’s currently reality, his parents had probably not come to show him off when he was about a year old. And she certainly couldn’t be expected to believe he had been to Eastern Canada with Paige and Dane back in the nineteenth century.
As they approached Kelowna, he did find himself favourably impressed by the view of the lake, and the long bridge stretching across it. Once across, Mr. Marchand turned right and drove to the Mission area,
where they stopped to pick up some groceries. From there he took a couple of turns his children were not familiar with, and finally pulled up in front of a medium-sized, older styled, family house with a back yard that sloped down toward a heavily sandbagged creek.
“Well, here we are,” he said to Jack. “Home, sweet home.”
Jack looked at his cousins’ house with interest, but interest turned into uneasiness when he saw the two of them looking at it in consternation.
As well they might, because, even though it was a perfectly nice house, in a perfectly nice neighbourhood, it wasn’t the house they had left earlier that summer.
Chapter Fifteen
“So, we…uh… live here?” Paige managed to say after stepping out of the car.
Her father laughed. “Don’t tell me we’ve been away so long you’ve forgotten the place. Or, no, wait. Maybe you thought it would change into a mansion in our absence.”
Now certain something was amiss, Jack asked him when they’d moved in.
“Just after Paige turned two,” Mr. Marchand replied, swinging pieces of luggage out onto the driveway. “Dane was born a couple of months later. Back then there was a fence along the creek. It blew down in a wind last year. I didn’t bother putting it back up because I figured these guys were past falling in, and it’s usually not too deep.” He glanced down at the turbulent water, which was seeping through the sandbag barrier in places but had not yet gone over the top. “Sure high now, though. Good thing the house is up a bit.”
“It certainly is,” Mrs. Marchand agreed. “But if the weather will just stay overcast, like it is today, we might be all right.” She picked up a suitcase. “You’ll be sharing Dane’s room, Jack. He and Paige both have bunk beds for when friends stay over.”
Dane found it really strange to walk into a house he had supposedly lived in all his life and not know where anything was—including his own room. A look at Paige confirmed she was feeling the same. In unspoken agreement with her, he let their mother lead the way to the bedroom area and managed to determine which room was his through the presence of several scientific models and the animal posters lining the walls.
Paige’s held art and craft supplies and some china figurines, but no doll collection. Nor was there any sign of the three cups she had won for dancing.
“Guess I didn’t go in for dolls or dance in my other life,” she said bitterly, though she was somewhat comforted to see her childhood companion, Marijane, sitting atop a chest of drawers. “There aren’t any karate medals or trophies in here either. Or in yours. Maybe that’s something else we didn’t ever do.”
Dane performed a short kata. “Seems like I still know it, though.”
He and Paige really liked karate and wanted to get to black belt level like their father. For it to be something they might no longer involved in was an additional upset.
Having made an early start, they were ready for an early lunch, which Mrs. Marchand quickly prepared.
“Where should we sit?” Dane asked as his parents slipped into what were obviously their usual places. “With Jack here, I mean,” he added to cover the fact he didn’t know which one was his.
Mr. Marchand waved toward the two chairs to his own left. “You can keep your regular seat. I put another chair beside it for Jack.”
This still left him with a choice. “Take your pick,” he said to Jack.
Jack did so and Paige slid into what was now the only free seat, a chair directly opposite them.
After lunch, Mr. Marchand went out to take a closer look at the creek and the children helped Mrs. Marchand with the dishes. Once they’d finished, Paige announced she was going to use the telephone.
“I want Cora to come over and hear about our trip.”
“Who’s Cora?” asked Mrs. Marchand, hanging the tea towels up to dry.
“Cora Weston. My best friend.”
“Oh? You don’t like Taya anymore?”
“Taya?”
“Taya Hendricks. The girl you chummed up with after your first best friend, Nadia, moved away.”
“I don’t know any Tayas. I do know a Nadia, and I like her all right, but she’s not my best friend, and since when did she move away?”
“Two years ago. But then you met Taya and you had a best friend again.”
“But Cora’s my best friend. She’s been my best friend forever. Well, from the time we were in kindergarten, anyway.”
“I don’t know any Cora, dear. Anyway, I haven’t really time to discuss it right now. I’ve got to unpack.”
She turned to leave, but Dane put out his hand to stop her.
“Wait a minute, Mum. Who’s my best friend?”
“Reece Sampson.”
“Not Brendan Malone?”
“No, I can’t say I know that name either. I’m obviously not as well up on who your friends are as I thought.”
“But Brendan’s the one’s who’s got Cupcake. I want to go over and get her.”
“Cupcake?”
“My dog. He’s been looking after her. Like Mrs. Crompton was looking after Abraham and Pearl, and Cora was looking after Elmer. You know, Paige’s rabbit, Elmer?”
Mrs. Marchand frowned impatiently. “Now, Dane, we’ve been through this before. I know how much you’d like a dog, but they cost a lot to keep and we’re too busy to give a dog, or any other pet, the attention it would require. I don’t know what kind of silly game you children are playing, but I really don’t have time for it right now.”
With that she went off, leaving Paige and Dane staring after her in disbelief.
“No pets?” Dane couldn’t accept it. “None? But…but we had them a few days ago. We told Cousin Florinda about them.”
“And Mum didn’t dispute the fact.” Paige swallowed hard, devastated to think she and Cora were no longer best friends. Or maybe not even friends at all, if her mother had never heard of her. “Things seem to be changing by the hour now. We have to talk to Granddad.”
She went after Mrs. Marchand to obtain permission and found her in Dane’s room stuffing clothes from his suitcase into a laundry basket.
“Do you want me to call Granny and Granddad and let them know we got here safely, like you did when we got to Uncle Neil’s?” she inquired, sticking her head around the door.
Her mother looked up. “Oh, yes. We must do that. Be sure to tell them the flood levels aren’t as bad as we thought but are still cause for concern. And don’t stay on the phone more than ten minutes. Long distance calls are expensive.”
“Like that’s ever bothered her before,” Paige said to the boys upon returning to them. “Or the pets’ upkeep, either.”
She plucked a cordless phone off its stand. To avoid being overheard, she took it down to what appeared to be a family room in the basement, the only room down there that was finished off. One o’clock in the afternoon their time was still only nine o’clock at night in England, and Granddad answered her call on the second ring.
“Thought that might be you. How’s everything at home? Water lapping at your front step yet?”
“Not at the house we’re standing in. What it’s doing at the house we used to live in, I couldn’t say, because, apparently, we don’t live there anymore.”
Granddad digested this information. “I see. Any other significant changes?” Paige told him, and then hit the speaker button so the boys could hear his reply. “Hmm. This is becoming increasingly disturbing. We do have some good news our end, though. We’ve found Aurea-Rose’s box. Once Aunt Merry and Uncle Ewan left, Mother and I made a thorough search of the cottage and found it at the back of a wardrobe.”
“What’s in it?” Dane asked.
“Exactly what she said was in it, cards with various rhymes and sayings written out in a hand I doubt was legible even before the ink faded. Penmanship doesn’t seem to have been one of Aurea-Rose’s strong points.”
Paige sighed. “I thought you said it was good news. What’s good about finding them if you can’t read the
m?”
“We’ve managed to decipher a couple, and Uncle Edmond’s taken the whole lot to someone who specializes in restoring old documents. Once she has, he’ll scan them and e-mail them to you.”
“What do the ones you’ve deciphered say?” asked Jack.
“Well, one definitely seems to pertain to our recent reality distortions. Got a pen?”
“Yes.” Paige snatched a notepad and pen from a nearby desk. “How does it go?”
“‘If what once was be now not so
To the Keeper’s Keeper go.
For from the hidden one’s domain
Balance and strength you can attain.’”
He stopped, indicating that was the end of it.
“And the other one?”
“It runs along the same lines.”
“‘None but those with travails deep
Can have what the Keeper’s Keeper keeps.
This long-sought treasure you must pursue
In a land that only some call new.’”
“Great. More mumbo jumbo,” Paige growled. “Let’s see now, the first one seems to be telling us that someone, somewhere, can help us make sense of what’s been happening, and maybe even do something about it. I can follow that bit, but just who is the Keeper’s Keeper? And where are we supposed to find this helpful being?”
“According to the second one, in a land that only some call new,” said Dane.
“And where’s that?” his sister demanded, glaring at him.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Then it’s not much use, is it?”
“Now, now, don’t bicker,” said Granddad. “We have to pull together on this. You just keep on trying to figure out the rhymes and we’ll do the same.”
“Okay.” Paige looked at her watch. “We’d better go. Mum’s on an economy drive and long, expensive chats have been prohibited. You and Uncle Edmond will have to keep Skype open for calls whenever you’re online so we can contact you that way.”