Now You See It . . .

by Vivian Vande Velde

  I used that time-honored tradition of taking a moment to scratch my head while I tried to come up with some believable explanation. "You must have blinked," I said.

  Eleni laughed. "No," she said firmly. "Try again."

  "Maybe the flash blinded you?"

  Ignoring my babbling, she told me suddenly, "You look very much like my sister, who died."

  "I am not a ghost," I informed her.

  For a moment she looked annoyed. "I didn't say I thought you were her. Besides, if Mathilda came back to Earth, which I don't for a moment think she might, I can't believe the first thing she would do would be to step into the path of an oncoming car. I just meant: There's a strong resemblance." She tipped her head and looked closely at me. "You look like me, too."

  Don't I wish, I thought.

  She finished, "Almost as though, maybe, we're related..."

  I was willing to go so far as to admit, "I suppose I could be from some very distant branch of your family."

  "Except none of us can pop into existence like something out of a Flash Gordon movie."

  "I don't know Flash Gordon," I said.

  "Don't try to change the subject."

  Once again she tipped her head and scrutinized me. "You dress oddly...," she said, which I guess I did in a world of pastel shirtwaist dresses and white gloves and hats, "and you speak rather oddly, too..."—and here I'd been congratulating myself on avoiding such dated references as manned space flights, Snoop Dogg, or SPAM as anything besides lunch meat. My grandmother asked, "So are you a crazy person who by coincidence just happens to look like a family member...?" Her eyes grew wide as a new thought came to her. "You're not from this time!" she gasped. "You're a time traveler from the future." She gave another gasp. "Are you the daughter I'm going to have?"

  "No," I said, wondering how—in minutes—she had come to the conclusion that I had most needed to keep her from.

  "Granddaughter?" she pressed.

  "No," I said, but perhaps not so passionately as before, for she leaned back with a self-satisfied look on her face.

  "So what have you come back from the future to warn me about?"

  "Nothing," I protested.

  She was sitting there, considering—I could tell— analyzing her life, trying to second-guess herself, attempting to figure out what she had done that she shouldn't have, or what she hadn't done that she should have, which had caused disastrous enough results that a messenger had been sent through time to intervene. I'd seen enough Star Trek reruns to know how the slightest change I caused here could escalate to dangerous proportions by my time—if my time ever arrived now that I'd blundered into my own family history.

  "Eleni, please," I begged. "Pretend I'm not here. You haven't done anything wrong or caused anything bad to happen."

  "Then why did you come here?" she asked.

  It seemed safest to tell her the truth. "By accident," I said.

  She gave me that skeptical look I was coming to recognize. So, without exactly admitting I was her granddaughter, I told her everything about the glasses, how I'd found them, the strange things they let me see. The one part I didn't tell her was about Westfall Nursing Home. What could I say? One day, you will be old, and your mind will fail? But I explained how Julian had followed me, and how, by running away from him, I'd found myself in a new world. I told about the elves who had captured him, and about that little blue blot on the universe, Larry, and how he'd led me to believe that all I needed to get home was to click my heels three times and say, "There's no place like home."

  "Gee whiz," Eleni said slowly when I'd finally finished, which sounded like one of those cute, mild fifties expressions. I didn't have the heart to tell her what whiz means today. She said, "Okay, explain again about this elf fellow Julian."

  "What?" I said. "Specifically?"

  "Why are you assuming the worst about him?"

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "It just seems like you abandoned him in a very bad situation."

  "Maybe," I admitted.

  She gave me a look that I recognized from when I'd been five years old and claimed an intruder must have broken into the house and stolen the cookies Nana had told me were for after dinner.

  "All right," I conceded. "Probably. But I'm not sure what that has to do with anything."

  "I'm just trying to understand. So he began going to your school in September, was always kind of quiet, never caused any trouble. Showed concern when he thought you were shaken up from the bus accident."

  "He was after my glasses," I interrupted.

  "Could you have stopped him from grabbing them away from you when you were outside the nurse's office?" Eleni asked. "All alone? Just the two of you?"

  "Hmmm," I said.

  "Sounds to me like he didn't know about them till after this Tiffanie girl told him. How long have you known her? Did she go to grammar school with you?"

  Grammar school? I didn't know if that meant elementary, middle, junior high, or high, but rather than admit that, I just explained, "I met her in ninth grade."

  "And so she's made your life miserable since then?"

  What was she getting at? Slowly, hesitantly, I said, "No."

  "Generally a mean-spirited girl, is she?"

  "Not really," I had to say. "She's, you know, a cheerleader type." Did they have cheerleaders in the 1950s? "You know, pretty, popular, never really pays attention to anybody not in her crowd. Not the worst of the type," I had to admit.

  Eleni said, "So it wasn't until you saw her looking ugly that you came to distrust her?"

  That was making me sound like the kind of girl who makes friends only with attractive people, and pokes fun at the rest. Was that what I was like? Not only a coward, but a small-minded coward? "She was old and ugly," I told Eleni. "She looked like a witch."

  Eleni raised her eyebrows at me. "So you distrust Julian for being too good-looking, and Tiffanie for not being good-looking enough."

  "They're not human," I said, "and they're trying to pass themselves off as though they are."

  "Which is a bad thing," Eleni said in a tone somewhere in between statement and question.

  "Depending on their purpose." Was she trying to tell me I was some sort of image bigot?

  "At this point we don't know their purpose," Eleni said. "All we know is that Julian could have revealed your hiding place and exposed you to the kind of people who get themselves into a mob of five, beat up an unarmed man, and try to kill an intelligent creature no more than a fraction of their size."

  "Well, intelligent may be overstating it for Larry," I protested.

  Eleni stood up. "Excuse me," she said.

  For a moment I thought she was so thoroughly disgruntled with my bad attitude that she was abandoning me. By squinting and extrapolating, I could tell she'd gone up to the drinking fountain on the other side of the Civil War general and fiddled with the mechanism; then she came back. "The water was stuck on," she explained. "I hate to waste. Where were we?"

  "You were telling me I'm a weenie."

  Eleni looked startled and said, "I'm sure I wasn't."

  I reworded it: "You were telling me that I jumped to conclusions about Tiffanie and Julian based on appearances, and that I assumed Julian was bad since he's obviously different, and so I did nothing to help him when he was confronted with people who were almost for-sure bad."

  That, Eleni was willing to nod at. But then, looking distracted, she again said, "Excuse me." She returned to the fountain and smacked it. When she came back to the bench, she told me, "I'm guessing the key to getting you back to your own time is to rescue Julian."

  "I don't see that. And seeing is the point entirely, I guess. Because, without those glasses, getting back to Julian is as impossible as getting back home."

  It was Eleni's turn to go "Hmmm." Then she said, "So where could those glasses have come from, anyway, to end up on your front lawn? If we could figure that out, maybe we could get you another pair."

  "Maybe, may
be not," I said, which was actually a lot more optimistic than I felt.

  Eleni stared off into space, trying to think of a solution, then suddenly snapped, "What is the matter with that fountain? It seems to have developed a mind of its own—a pigheaded, disagreeable mind."

  And with a lead-in line like that, how could I not finally catch on?

  This time, I went. When I got near the fountain, I could see it was spurting high into the air—like if a normal-sized person was holding a finger over the spigot.

  Or if a chipmunk-sized person was holding his little blue butt in the way of the water flow. "Larry!" I cried.

  I looked into the fountain. And found my one remaining lens sitting in the water waiting for me.

  15. The Relative Sizes of Hearts

  The spray of water was squirting high into the air off to my left, so I was able to pick my lens out of the bowl of the fountain. I was using the hem of my T-shirt as a drying cloth when the water veered right, nailing me between the eyes.

  A moment later the water turned off.

  "Yeah, you demented little blueberry," I muttered as I resumed wiping, "and if you're thinking of claiming that was an accident, don't even bother."

  I held the lens up to my right eye. I've never mastered winking; I can just barely manage to keep my right eye open with my left eye closed, though not vice versa.

  The world came back into focus, including a soggy Larry, sitting on the edge of the drinking fountain. "Of course it was an accident," he told me, sounding as sincere as someone trying to sell something in an infomercial. "Water is slippery; it made me slip." He added, "You look like a pirate, squinting that way: Ahoy, maties! Anyone seen my parrot? Arr, arr." He made a very disagreeable face which was probably supposed to reflect how I looked, with his eyes squeezed tightly shut and his mouth drooping open foolishly.

  Before I had a chance to demonstrate to him some of water's other qualities—like the ability to drown little blue smart-mouths—Eleni came up behind me. "Is he really here?" she asked in an awed voice. "Larry?"

  "You bet your sweet bottom I'm here," Larry told her, giving a big, noisy air kiss.

  "Don't talk to her like that," I warned him, grateful that without the glasses she could neither see nor hear him.

  He clicked his heels and saluted sharply. "Jawohl, mein Kapitän!" he assured me. But then he held his hand up by the side of his mouth—a shield, as though that would prevent me from seeing—and made kissy lips at my grandmother.

  "What's he saying?" Eleni asked.

  "I'm in love," Larry moaned.

  "Nothing," I told her. To Larry, I said, "If you can't behave yourself, I won't help you."

  "You!" he hooted. "Help me?" He laughed so hard, he rolled off the edge of the water fountain and had to use his wings to keep aloft. As they were a bit waterlogged, he had to flap like crazy just to slow his descent. He looked less like a graceful hummingbird than like a dodo who hasn't been told that dodos can't fly.

  "Correct me if I'm wrong," I said in my most superior tone, "but you only tried to get our attention once"—I caught myself in time not to say "Nana"—"once Eleni expressed concern for Julian. You wanted me to stay to help him, so now I'm thinking you want me to go back to help him. And that's the only reason you rescued my lens: on the off chance that I might do what you wanted."

  Larry had wafted down to the ground and he was shaking his wings like a dog drying itself off. "Maybe" was all he would admit to.

  "May I look?" Eleni asked.

  "The lens is matched to my prescription," I said.

  Larry gave a snort and said, "The lens lets anybody see."

  I hesitated before passing that information along to Eleni. "He's rude and crude," I added, reluctantly handing the lens to her.

  Eleni gave me a like-you're-not? look which reminded me that teenagers in the 1950s spoke differently from teenagers in my time. She put the lens up to her right eye. "Neat-o!" she said. Then she leaned slightly forward and asked, "May I?"

  Larry must have said yes because she extended her left hand out, palm up.

  Yuck! I thought, realizing she must have let him climb onto her hand. I wouldn't trust him that close to me, but then, I'd known him longer.

  She straightened, with her hand in front of her face, obviously listening to him.

  And listening to him.

  And listening to him...

  "What's he saying?" I demanded.

  I expected her to answer, "Nothing" to demonstrate how annoying I'd been, but she told me, "He said Julian and his side of the family are much more benevolent rulers than Berrech and his crowd would be. And that the current rulers have a hands-off-the-humans policy which we"—she indicated her and me—"should be aware of before you"—now pointing at me—"ask, 'So what?' He's also saying it would be a lot easier to explain things if both of us could see and hear him at the same time."

  That needed a moment to sink in. As we only had one lens, I guessed, "Oh, so he wants you to come through the arch, too."

  She raised her eyebrow at me, and I realized that my tone could, maybe, have been taken as insulting.

  "I mean," I explained myself, "it's probably a dangerous thing to ever suspect Larry of acting altruistically."

  Eleni handed the lens back to me, keeping her other palm outstretched for Larry. "He says his heart is broken."

  When I looked through the lens, Larry was sitting cross-legged on Eleni's palm. He told me, "I like her a lot better than I like you."

  "That's fine," I said. "I don't like you at all."

  "Stop bickering," Eleni said. "The two of you sound like my cousins, who aren't old enough to go to school yet."

  Probably sounding even more like those cousins, I complained, "Do not," and was irritated that Larry muttered the exact same thing at the exact same time.

  "What you need to do," Eleni said, "is ask him: If we go to this Elfland, or whatever it's called, can we each return to our own separate homes?"

  I tried to hand the lens back to her, but she shook her head. "You know him better. You have to be the judge whether he's telling the truth."

  Larry clapped his hands to his heart and cried, "Wounded! Her harsh words have wounded me!"

  "Well, that's one in the I-don't-believe-him column," I warned.

  "Kazaran Dahaani," he said.

  "What?"

  "Where we were. It's not 'Elfland,' which, excuse me, girls, is a pretty lame excuse for a name. The place is called Kazaran Dahaani. Put that in the why-would-he-lie-about-THAT? column."

  Having learned firsthand how frustrating it was to be left out of the conversation, I told Eleni, "He says the place I met him is called ... ahm ... Caravan Salami—"

  "Kazaran Dahaani," Larry corrected wearily, like he wasn't speaking a foreign language I had never heard before and I should have gotten it the first time.

  "Kazaran Dahaani," I repeated. To Larry, I said, "All right: If Eleni and I go back to Kazaran Dahaani—" All fluttery, he got to his feet. "Now don't get your little blue self excited," I cautioned. "All I said was 'if.' If we go there just long enough to hear you out. If we go, whether or not we decide to stay to help Julian. If we do that, will we be able to go back home: Eleni here, and me to my place and time?"

  "Yes," Larry assured me with an emphatic nod.

  While I weighed the sincerity of his answer, Eleni said, "Find out what went wrong last time."

  "Yeah," I said. "How did I end up here?"

  "You must have been thinking about your grandmother at this age," Larry answered.

  Chagrined that he'd figured out our relationship, and not daring to ask him to please not tell her—since I suspected that would be the single most likely thing he'd do if he knew I dreaded it—I asked, "Uh-huh, so if I'd been thinking of Big Bird, I would have ended up on Sesame Street?"

  "No," Larry sneered. "I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Sesame Street is a made-up place. The closest you could have gotten was the soundstage where it's filmed."<
br />
  "Big Bird?" Eleni asked, but I ignored her and countered Larry's statement by demanding, "And Kazaran Dahaani is real?"

  "Duh." Larry glanced longingly at Eleni. "I really prefer—"

  "I don't care if you prefer talking to her," I told him. "I'm the one with the lens."

  He crossed his arms and sat back down again on Eleni's outstretched palm with a sulky "Lucky me."

  "Don't you mutter at me," I warned him, realizing even as I said it that I was sounding like my own mother. "I never heard of Kazaran Dahaani," I continued. "I was definitely not wishing about, thinking about, or picturing in my mind any place like that."

  "Duh," Larry said. Boy, that's annoying, you know? He explained, "Kazaran Dahaani is the default setting."

  "Default setting," I repeated for Eleni's benefit, then snapped at Larry, "Okay—what's that mean?"

  With the singsong enthusiasm of one of those Sesame Street characters we'd just been talking about announcing the letter of the day, Larry explained, "Every other time you pass through a gate, you come out at Kazaran Dahaani. Or, to put it another way: Starting from Kazaran Dahaani, you can get anywhere. But, starting from anywhere, you get to Kazaran Dahaani. So..." he continued, now in a condescending, lecturing tone, "before you ask ... no, you would not be able to go directly to your home from here: You have to pass through Kazaran Dahaani first."

  "I don't know...," I said.

  Eleni, reacting to my skepticism, asked, "You think he's lying?"

  Larry crossed his heart and put a finger to his lips, all the while wearing a solemn expression that practically screamed, Of course, I'm lying!

  "I don't know," I repeated.

  "Your other choice," Larry pointed out, "is to stay here."

  "Yeah," I said, "I—" I sighed. "I pretty much have to trust you because I can't stay here. But there's no reason for Eleni to put herself in danger by following you anywhere."

  "Except," Larry said, "that she's smarter than you, she's braver than you, and she has a bigger heart than you. You're much more likely to succeed if she's helping you. Besides, if she stayed here, you'd probably squirm out of helping Julian. You'd go back home instead, now that I've rescued you."