by Vered Ehsani
“No, she’s deaf, blind and has difficulty looking after herself, never mind us. But now that you’re here,” Shanti continued in an ultra-sweet tone, “we won’t need her anyways.”
“So if your babysitter is downstairs cooking,” Juna continued, “who do you have locked away upstairs?”
“Huh?” Wow, these girls had so completely lost me. But in the brief moment of quiet, I could hear something or someone making noise upstairs. It sounded like a combination of scratching and banging, with an occasional and very muffled shout.
“Ah, Shanti. When you were telling me how you escaped before, did you happen to forget to mention any details? Like what you might have done in between opening the front door the first time and running to the cottage?”
Shanti just gazed at me, her eyes large and innocent. I knew better. “Shanti, how did you manage to give Kali’s reflection the slip?” I demanded.
Shanti scowled, although I could tell it wasn’t at me but at our new companion. She turned to me. “When I opened the door,” she stated, ignoring Juna completely while at the same time trying to impress her with the story of her daring escape, “and that weird guy came into the house, all these crazy shadow things came with him.”
“What about your babysitter?” Juna interrupted.
Shanti didn’t bother to look around. “She was locked up in her room. That guy broke things all over the place and I was screaming for her to come out and help while he dragged me right past her door, and all she could say was, ‘Would you like poisoned potatoes for dinner, dear’.” Then she grinned. “I’m pretty sure she had no clue that she was missing a kid or two.
“So I was wondering what to do, when the weirdo told me I had to come with him, and that’s when I decided enough was enough, so I kicked him. Hard. He had some trouble breathing after that and he let me go. So I ran back upstairs to find you. And then after I saw you disappear into the book, I grabbed it and tried to leave, like you told me. But then, he caught up to me and tried to grab the book. So I ran back upstairs into the attic and hid there. He followed me up, and just when he thought he had me trapped, I pushed him backwards and into that large trunk, which I closed on him. And then I locked it.”
“You what?” I interrupted.
“I locked him in that old, smelly trunk in the attic. Man, did he make a lot of fuss about that, but then I figured no one was actually going to hear him, given that our babysitter was stone deaf and you were locked inside a book. And then the doorbell rang again. And I was thinking, man, what is with this day? So I opened the front door…”
“You didn’t,” I exclaimed, shaking my head.
“I did,” she stated. “And who should be there but our neighbor. You know, Mr. Wilson. And he started complaining about the noise. So I promised him I’d turn down the TV. Then I started hearing Bibi’s voice. It was really faint, like she was whispering from another room. Now that kind of tripped me up, hearing her voice, but then I decided maybe I shouldn’t read too much into it since I’d just seen the house invaded by giant mutant spiders and my brother get eaten by a book. She told me to go to her place. I wanted to deal with the insane guy locked in the attic and possibly find you. But she said I needed to get out of the house first. I figured she had a point…”
“So you left me?” I didn’t bother hiding my outrage.
“Yeah, for a short time.”
“Short time for you, maybe, but that must’ve been the longest, hottest, most horrible night and day…” I blustered out.
“Save it,” she snapped back. “You got yourself into this mess by disobeying Bibi, remember? You should’ve told me not to open up the door and let Freak Face in.”
That shut me up. She was right. And she knew it. I’d never hear the end of it.
“Anyways, I followed her instructions and found her cottage. And you know the rest.”
Juna had been watching us as avidly as tennis fans watch a match, with a bemused look. “So tell me again: who’s locked in the trunk?”
“Come on,” I muttered as I began to march resolutely up the stairs. “We can’t leave him in there.”
“Really?” Shanti asked. “Why not?”
I didn’t bother responding but tugged on my hair, wondering what I would actually do with the guy in the trunk. The noise intensified as we reached the second floor landing. Shanti ducked into her room and came out with her baseball bat. Juna looked impressed and nodded her approval. Cautiously, we climbed into the attic. It was still hot and dusty and cluttered with junk.
“Go ahead,” Shanti hissed at me, giving me a push in the small of my back.
“Hey, you’re the one who’s armed,” I whispered back.
“Yeah, but there might be spiders over there.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then knock them out with the bat.”
But I went first with the girls right behind me. We stood in a huddle in front of the trunk, which was quivering and occasionally hopping about. Two metal latches kept the lid securely locked; all I had to do was reach out and unsnap them. Juna gestured encouragingly towards the trunk. I reached out gingerly, flipped up the latches and then pushed back into the girls as the lid of the trunk went flying upwards.
“Bibi?” I exclaimed as, for the second time in a day, my eccentric relative appeared in the most unexpected place.
Bibi stood up and gazed about as if it was perfectly normal to pop up out of a locked trunk in the attic.
“But where’s Kali’s reflection?” I spluttered. “And how did you get here?”
“Good questions,” my aunt admitted.
“Wait.” I stared at her suspiciously, trying to figure out which version of Bibi I was talking with. “Do you even remember me?”
She stared at me like that was a crazy question. “Well, of course. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you didn’t in the clearing,” I spluttered back, my eyes wide and glaring. “Remember what happened in the clearing? You were chatting with Kali like you and him were all friends and everything, and neither one of you recognized me. And in the veil, before you disappeared, you were…” I struggled to find an adequate word.
“Erratic?” Shanti suggested. “More crazy than usual? Schizophrenic?”
“All of the above,” I yelled.
Bibi stared at me, her dark eyes even darker in the gloomy light of the attic. Then she shrugged her shoulders and stepped out of the trunk.
“You don’t remember the conversation in the veil? It’s like I was talking with two different people inhabiting the same body.”
“Schizophrenic,” Shanti repeated.
Bibi smiled and nodded. “No. I do remember seeing you there and I was warning you not to come in. A warning you probably ignored.”
“But you don’t remember being in Crossings?” I demanded, my face flushed and not just from the stifling, dusty heat of the attic. “You never tried to stop Kali from going through the key or portal or whatever?”
Bibi didn’t answer but looked around the attic with great interest. Maybe she really did think that dirty boxes full of broken bits of junk were brilliantly fascinating.
“He wanted to use Crossings to move around in time and do… whatever he wanted to do.” I threw up my hands. “Any of this ringing a bell?” I was breathing heavily now and my hands were shaking. “You warned him that it was too dangerous and he could be split and his energy scattered and…”
Bibi started walking away.
“You made that map. You left me a warning message!” I shouted at her. “Why don’t you remember?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to,” Shanti suggested.
“Maybe she can’t,” Juna said softly as she laid a hand on my shoulder.
I shrugged her hand away. “She can. She does. She has to.”
I started after Bibi, but Shanti grabbed my arm and shook her head. We watched as Bibi slowly shuffled to the stairs and descended. Just before her head vanished, she glanced over at me.
“He’s no l
onger here and now, so you don’t need to worry,” she said softly. “Time is not linear, Ash. But shadows and light are a part of all of us.” And with that, she left.
I listened to her fading footsteps and my jagged breathing. Shanti let go of me, and slumped down on a stack of moldering books next to the trunk. Juna shifted towards her and began shuffling through the few remaining contents of the trunk.
“But where did he go? And how? Why didn’t she recognize me in the clearing? And why was she in the trunk?”
I didn’t realize I had spoken out loud until Shanti murmured in response, “Maybe the answers have something to do with what she said about time.”
I glanced over at her. She was staring at me intently, probably wondering if I was going to fly into a rage. I chewed on my lip and waited for my heart to slow down from its mad pumping to something approaching normal before I responded.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have lost it.”
Juna snickered as she kept prodding around in the trunk. “Glad to see I’m not the only one with a temper. What was that you told me before? What we focus on…”
“We become. We can be shadows or light. Yeah, yeah, thanks for the reminder.”
She shrugged. “Hey, I’m working on becoming a Zen master, just like you.”
I snorted and Shanti rolled her eyes. I plopped myself down onto the floor and coughed as a cloud of dust enveloped me.
“So what do you think she meant?” I asked Shanti. If anyone could come up with a clever theory, she could.
“Well,” she mused, brushing off dust from her pants. That’s when I realized she was still wearing her baseball uniform, minus the cap. “It’s clear that Kali’s reflection not only escaped from the trunk, but he also left our time. That’s what Bibi was saying. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Neither Kali nor Bibi recognized you in that clearing in 1860,” Shanti continued, clearly warming up to whatever theory she had percolating in her head. “What if that meeting happened before either of them met you?”
“But in the veil,” I began. She held up a finger.
“In the veil, whatever Kali was planning was starting to impact Bibi, so that sometimes she was Bibi after meeting you, and sometimes she was Bibi before she had met you.”
“Uh huh.” I scratched my head.
“Going back to the clearing,” Shanti continued, leaning closer to me. “So what if from that point, Kali used the portal in the clearing and went back in time to 1773 where he met you?”
I nodded. “Ok, but what about his reflection that you locked up in the trunk? Where did that vanish to?”
“Ok, just bear with me.” She waved at me, as if telling me to sit, even though I already was. “What if the splitting of Kali’s energy happened when you were in the clearing, at Crossings, just like Bibi had warned him? So part of him got sent back to 1773 and part of him, his reflection, got sent forward to our recent past. Then today, something sucked the reflection back in time, back to before all this splitting happened. So now, the whole thing starts over again.”
“That sounds complicated,” Juna muttered. She was flipping through a rather tattered looking album she’d pulled out of the trunk.
“Complicated, but somehow it works,” I mused. “Time isn’t linear. In one of my dreams, Bibi told Kali that if he did whatever he was planning, they would continue their cycle without being able to escape. So why was he so desperate to find my book in 1773 if he had that map?”
Shanti hesitated and then continued. “We burned the map, remember? He only had the map in 1860, when Bibi drew it.”
“So how did his reflection get sucked back?”
Shanti eyeballed Juna. She must’ve felt our stare because she looked up and demanded, “What? What’d I do this time?”
“Remember my theory on connections?” Shanti explained. “Her tornado is the connection. While Kali may have used the portal to go back in time, it was the tornado that returned Bibi, with her memory of past events, to us. It also sucked Kali’s reflection back, like a swap. Remember, the tornado landed with Juna on this house first, before it popped over and destroyed Bibi’s cottage.”
“Thanks a lot,” Juna muttered. “I get blamed for everything.”
“Oh please,” Shanti snapped back. “Stop taking it so personally.”
I gazed into the dusty air, reflecting on Shanti’s theory. I still didn’t get the map thing, but the rest of it made sense, in a weird, circular kind of way. I still had questions, like why Bibi didn’t want to tell us all this directly, or what her relationship was with Kali before he went through the key or portal or whatever he used. I sighed heavily.
“Ah, guys,” Juna said quietly, interrupting my moody musings. Her voice sounded constricted. “You might want to take a look at this.” She was staring down at the old album on her lap. “Your last name’s Chandari, right?”
“Yeah,” I answered in a defensive tone.
“How old do you think Aruhi, or Bibi, is?”
I shrugged. I didn’t feel like talking about Bibi.
“I don’t know,” Shanti responded in a disinterested tone, yawned and sneezed. “I always figured it was rude to ask. Maybe… sixty?”
“Try over 200 years old.”
Shanti made some rude noise while I spluttered out, “What? That must be someone else.”
“Ok, take a look.”
I crouched down beside Juna, while Shanti looked over her shoulder. We studied the black and white photo. It was a portrait. Bibi was sitting very stiffly, staring with wide eyes into the camera, her hands folded neatly on her lap.
“Look, Ash,” Shanti breathed out as she pointed at the blotchy birthmark at the base of Bibi’s left thumb. Underneath the photo, someone had written in neat black lettering, ‘Aruhi Chandari, May 1851.’
“What are the chances that there’s someone else with that name who looks identical to your aunt and has the exact same weird splotch of a birthmark?” Juna asked. I think we all had a pretty good idea that it was slim.
“But it’s still possible,” Shanti argued. “I mean, this Aruhi could’ve had really strong genes that got passed down to our aunt. And Bibi could’ve been named after her.”
“That’s a pretty unusual birthmark,” I commented and then peered closer. “And look, you can see the chickenpox scars around her neck. They’re identical.” I pointed at the cluster of small, round scars clearly visible above the ruff of Aruhi’s dress. “That’s not genetic.”
Shanti involuntarily placed a hand over her own neck while Juna nodded her head and carefully flipped over the thick, crusty sounding paper. The next photo was grainy but we all recognized two of the five people in the group.
“What’s Kali doing there?” I hissed. He was standing beside Bibi. They weren’t fighting, arguing or even looking like they were unhappy with each other. They were standing side by side, smiling at the camera. Smiling together, like nothing had happened. The photo description read ‘Christmas party, 18 December 1858’. So for them, nothing had happened yet. It was two years before Crossings.
I blinked my eyes hard; something was stinging them. I was shaking. I gritted my teeth, grinding them together. I felt like ripping the album away from Juna and setting a match to it. I clenched my hands into fists. I didn’t want Juna to turn over the page. She did. We all stared.
It was a death announcement, carefully cut out and pasted in the book.
‘Aruhi Chandari. Died 25 December 1860 of mysterious causes. Survived by grieving family.’
We sat there wordlessly, reading and re-reading that small newspaper cutting, as if those three sentence fragments would somehow reveal more information. Dust motes danced in the dim sunlight coming through the grungy window. The attic got warmer. Still we sat in the quiet dimness.
Finally, Juna whispered, “My tornado brought back a ghost?”
Shanti and I stared at each other. She looked like she’d just seen a giant spider.
I gulped har
d to remove the tightness in my throat brought on by countless memories. I pictured Bibi in our kitchen, sipping tea and joking while she lectured me about focus and light and getting off the fence and getting involved in life. And all that time…
“Yeah,” I murmured. “A tea loving, eccentric ghost.”
Juna nodded and closed the photo album. “So...”
“So we have some cleaning up to do,” Shanti stated in a low but clear voice. “Let’s get working.”
“Let’s… ah…” I wiped a hand across my face. I could feel bits of grit on my fingers. I’d probably left streaks of dust on my cheeks. “Maybe we start downstairs.”
We didn’t say anything else but tiptoed down to the front door area. For once, there was no noise coming from the guest room; Mrs. Garcia must’ve been taking a nap. Shanti found a couple brooms and we began.
In between one sweep of the broom, and the next, I heard it: from somewhere far away and back in time, a grandfather clock chimed out the twelve strokes of midnight. Then there was silence.
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Vered
from Africa… with a Bite
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