Max smiled, and Samuel smiled back.
It was common for the neighborhood kids to come to Samuel in times of trouble. He made the Crooked Willow a safe haven for them and gave them jobs. Almost all of them had gone on to lead happy lives. Samuel took a lot of pride in that.
That’s how Truman came to him, alone and scared in the middle of the night, running as fast as his then-frail body could carry him. It took a lot of courage to try to escape from the In-Between. They didn’t take kindly to people who succeeded. Sometimes they even put a price on their heads. Nora, who would sneak into the In-Between and help people get out, had spent months convincing Truman he could get away. She’d given him the address of the Crooked Willow and Samuel’s name. It seemed like only yesterday that Samuel found Truman standing outside the Crooked Willow just like Max was tonight.
Samuel flipped the light switch in his office and sighed with relief. The world might be a disorderly place, but his world was not. A place for everything and everything in its place. He shifted five books on one of the shelves of his bookcase, which caused the whole bookcase to slide to the right and reveal a metal bank vault door. With nimble fingers, he keyed the long code to trigger a laser swipe of his face. The hinges creaked as the door opened wide.
The glowing light within the vault bathed Samuel’s face in gold. The walls were filled with freshly waxed wooden boat oars. Samuel ran his hands across them, stopping to assess his grip on one or another of the oars. After tracing his hand along the longest wall, Samuel carefully selected four of the oars. He held them in his hands to get a sense of their weight and balance. Once he was satisfied with his selections, he resealed the vault.
Samuel made his way back to the great room of the café. Max was gone. He’d washed his milk glass and plate and left them on a towel to dry. Next to the towel was a small blue and silver book with jewels on the cover, along with a note:
“Dear Mr. Samuel: Thanks for the food and milk. I found this book by the table. Someone must have forgotten it. See you tomorrow.—Max”
Samuel flipped open the front cover of the book. Under the title The Starlighter, there was a quote in very small, tight script:
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” —Rumi
Samuel instantly recognized the handwriting. He smiled, tucked the book under his arm, and headed out onto the streets with only the moon and the stars to light his way to the boat pond in Central Park. He looked forward to returning the book to its rightful owner.
CHAPTER 24
TO BE AN INNKEEPER
Raymond flitted between several dimly lit rooms, scanning each to evaluate its pros and cons. It had been five long years since anyone from the Council had to go underground, and no one had ever gone into hiding in the library. He still felt uncomfortable with this arrangement, but he had been overruled. He was confident that eventually they’d realize he was right.
There was no telling how long Emerson and Skylar would need to recover, to say nothing of how long Emerson’s training would be if she chose to accept that path. Weeks? Months? Years? It was hard to tell without seeing her aptitude in full force. Certainly, she was gifted. As Nora’s daughter, she couldn’t be anything but. However, giftedness only takes anyone so far. What mattered now was her discipline and focus. Could she understand the full gravity of the situation they now faced and her place in it?
After careful evaluation, Raymond finally settled on a room for Emerson. Its curved gold-leaf walls framed an expansive canvas shrouded in navy-colored drapes. Raymond pulled back one of the heavy drapes and took a deep breath. The Dead Sea spread out before his eyes. He looked at his pocket watch—9 p.m. in New York; 4 a.m. in Jordan. A voice spoke from the canvas.
“Don’t look so glum, Raymond,” said a melodic voice. “The sun will be up soon. It always is.”
“This sunrise will be different, Kondo,” said Raymond.
A small boat with a lone man in it rowed into view in the inky blackness of the Dead Sea. He was elf-like in appearance with a large nose, pointed ears, and a wide smile that sparkled like his eyes.
“Every sunrise is different,” said Kondo. “That’s what makes each one worth seeing.”
Raymond smiled slightly for the first time in a long time.
“Goodnight, Kondo.”
“Good day, Raymond.” With that, the man rowed his boat across the vista and out of sight, leaving no traceable wake.
A loud whooshing sound flowed into the room as Raymond closed the drapes again. He headed down the hallway toward the Atrium and stopped abruptly in front of a vertical swirl of bright light as it snapped to get his attention.
“Do you really need me to explain what’s happening?” said Raymond as he addressed the light. “I dare say you engineered this one on your own, without consulting any of us, mind you. Don’t think for a second that I’m fine with all this. I most certainly am not. But now the fight’s really on, for better or worse, and we’ve got no choice but to rise up again. If it’s a fight they’re after, it’s a fight they’ll get. A fight to the bitter, ugly end. And you better be there to help us, to help Emerson, every step of the way.”
A surge in the light sculpture swirled in response to Raymond’s anger. He shielded his face with one arm.
“Well, what else did you expect of us?” Raymond sniped. “The fate of human imagination—the guts of creative thought—hinge on our actions.”
The light softened.
“We’re going to need you,” said Raymond. “Emerson’s going to need you. So please don’t give up now.”
The light offered nothing beyond its usual crackling, like kindling being consumed by a roaring fire. Raymond turned away and took the stairs two at time to meet their best and only hope.
CHAPTER 25
THE WORLD YOU NEVER KNEW
Emerson felt a shiver zip through her whole body as they made their way through Central Park in the dead of night. She was cold to the bone and pulled her jacket tight around her. Every step felt like walking on a bed of needles. The leg brace caused her to swing one of her legs around whenever she took a step forward. Her dad and Irene had their arms wrapped around her for support. Irene had the strength of someone less than half her age.
“Are you sure you want to walk?” asked Oliver. “I could carry you.”
“No,” Emerson said through chattering teeth. “I can walk. I need to walk.”
“The shivering is a side effect of the tonic,” she whispered to Emerson. “It drops your internal temperature to preserve the body.”
Emerson nodded. Skylar walked ahead of them with Jasper supporting her. Emerson’s head felt full and foggy. Since she woke up in the hospital, she had so many questions, but she didn’t yet have the energy to articulate them. It took all the strength she had just to breathe and put one foot in front of the other. What she needed was sleep, and a lot of it. But she had to walk. Her dad’s face was full of worry every time he looked at her. She had to show him that she was going to be okay.
As they walked, Emerson thought she heard the statues that lined Literary Walk breathe. Two policemen approached and paid no attention to them.
“Quiet night tonight,” said one policeman to the other without breaking his stride.
“Every once in a while, we catch a break, huh?” the other policeman responded.
Irene quickly stepped to the side to avoid having the policemen walk right into them.
“Isn’t the park supposed to be closed now?” asked Emerson.
“Who says it isn’t?” whispered Irene.
Though Emerson kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, she felt Irene’s warm and playful smile in the tone of her voice.
“How could those police officers not see us?” asked Emerson.
“It’s hard to see someone who’s invisible.”
Emerson had never been in Central Park this
late at night, and it felt uncomfortable to not have Friday at her side. She had grown used to relying on his instincts and sense of direction. Truman had taken Friday to his workshop, and Emerson had given him explicit instructions on how to walk Friday so he would feel comfortable. Friday had looked at her with sad eyes when she left the hospital without him. It must have felt as strange to him as it did to her.
They followed the path the moon paved for them along the cobblestones and down the stairs into the tunnel that would put them right next to Bethesda Fountain. In the frigid, dark air, their footsteps seemed unusually loud to Emerson. One of her earliest memories was of her dad rowing a canoe across the boat pond while she and her mom watched for ducks, turtles, and fish in the water below. The memory of the golden sun on that afternoon warmed her now. She heard her mother’s laugh, a full and happy giggle.
“Emmy, say hi to the turtles. Hi, turtles. Say hi to the baby ducks. Hi, baby ducks.”
Now she and her friends stopped in the shadow of the bronze statue that Emerson loved best: Alice in Wonderland sitting on a mushroom and surrounded by the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and the Dormouse. In the moonlight, Alice’s face looked concerned. Emerson had never noticed that before. Now she questioned if she ever saw anything as it really was. Maybe Alice was always concerned about passersby, and shouldn’t she be? She knew what it meant to feel like a stranger in a strange place. And now so did Emerson.
“Here he comes,” said Jasper, pointing up the hill toward 72nd Street.
Emerson squinted as a looming and confident figure walked toward them. She scanned the other side of the pond and let her gaze rest on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen reading to the ugly duckling. Emerson remembered sitting on Hans’s knee when she was little. She’d pretend that he was reading the book to her. She loved his face. Kind and wise, it was the face of someone who knew how the story ended but wouldn’t dare spoil it for others.
The figure was only a few feet away from them now. It was Samuel.
“Here we are,” he said handing large oars to Jasper, Oliver, and Irene. He kept the fourth one for himself.
“It’s been a long time since we needed to use these,” said Irene as she turned the oar over in her hands.
“I wish we never had to use them again,” said Samuel.
“May this be the last time they’re needed,” said Jasper.
Samuel nodded.
“Irene,” Jasper said, “You and Oliver go first with Emerson. Samuel and I will follow with Skylar.”
“Go where?” asked Emerson.
“Home,” said Jasper with a smile.
Irene walked to the edge of the boat pond. She glanced back and saw that Emerson was still a few paces behind.
“This way, Emerson,” she said.
“But we don’t have a boat.”
“There’s no sense in having something we don’t need,” said Irene as she beckoned Emerson toward her. “Come on now. Stand behind me.”
Emerson approached the pond. Irene placed her oar in the water, which went completely calm and still. She stepped onto it without sinking and without getting wet. She was standing on the water.
“What happened?” Emerson asked as her eyes widened and she reached down to touch the water in front of her. It was solid and dry. She stepped onto it with one foot and then the other.
“How did you do that?” she asked in complete amazement.
Irene just smiled. Oliver stepped onto the solid water behind Emerson.
“Let’s go,” he said. He and Irene began to row them forward with a few flicks of the oars.
“We’re moving,” Emerson said. “We’re moving!” She felt as light as a feather as they glided toward the center of the pond. When she turned to look back, she saw Jasper, Skylar, and Samuel following them.
Emerson took in all her surroundings and for a moment forgot her pain. This was a perspective of Central Park she’d never seen before. Once they reached the center of the pond, they all formed a straight line and turned to face the statue of Alice. The outline of the statue glowed with a bright emerald-green light.
Irene began to stir the water with her oar like a medicine woman stirring a pot of bubbling potion. At first the ripples were small and localized around the oar. Then they expanded, and soon it seemed that she was stirring the entire pond into a single swirl of light. She whispered words that Emerson recognized from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
With that, Alice’s eyes lit up, and that same emerald-green light filled the entire boat pond. A yellow beam slowly traced a circle around the six of them at the center of the water and opened into a chute of iridescent light that consumed them all at once. Emerson’s shriek shot through the night like a bullet, and in an instant, every trace of their presence on the pond was gone.
CHAPTER 26
A WELCOME FALL
Emerson and the others drifted in shafts of psychedelic light for a long time. Though she was falling, her movements felt controlled and secured, if it were possible to fall and feel safe at the same time. She looked at her dad, and his face was focused on what waited for them below. To her left, Irene’s face was serene as if this spectacle was just like watching television. She smiled slightly from time to time as if reliving a happy memory; she fell with extreme confidence.
The colors thrilled Emerson. She could feel the swirls of sparkling orange, violet, and ruby red light bathing her skin in silky wisps. Ribbons of light wrapped themselves around her, mostly on the parts of her body that felt sore and broken. They were there, and then they weren’t. She felt better after their touch. When she held out her hands, the colors trickled through her fingers like oils, leaving behind faint streaks for a second or two. Scents of jasmine, orange, and honeysuckle filled her nose. The light felt and smelled good enough to eat. At one point, she opened her mouth and could taste a sweetness that was rich and comforting.
They began to slow down to a gentle float. Without her permission, Emerson’s legs extended in front of her, and she landed softly in a gondola crafted from the same light that had removed them from the heart of Central Park. The light had brought them into an underground cavern she never knew existed.
The column of light now extended into an infinite amount of small golden lights clustered together to form the ceiling high above them. They twinkled like stars, each distinct but threaded into a tightly woven whole that extended as far as Emerson could see. They all converged on what looked like the sun at the edge of the horizon, where they met the water that now ferried their gondola forward.
Emerson looked over the side of the gondola and pulled back in surprise. Small lights twinkling beneath the surface of the emerald-colored water illuminated her face and danced to the music of a flute.
“Dip your hand in and move the lights aside,” her dad said.
She did as he instructed, and it was as if she were pushing aside a curtain to peer through a window. She saw sweeping scenes filled with people, animals, and rich landscapes and recognized them from the travel brochures that she kept tucked away under her bed. Temples in Burma at sunrise, the Northern Lights in Iceland, a sunset over the Swiss Alps, swaths of the African savanna, and the tangled vines nestled deep in the Amazon rainforest.
“Dad, look!” she said.
Oliver smiled wide. “From here, you can go anywhere, at any time,” he said. “Go take a closer look.”
“Let’s all go,” said Jasper. The twinkle in his eyes matched the twinkles of the lights that surrounded them as he dove into the water, and everyone followed.
Emerson’s heart fluttered as she dove. She heard a whooshing sound and felt the same supportive falling that she’d experienced in the shaft of light below the boat pond. Her feet landed softly on the ground, and she stood next to Jasper. A blazing grapefruit-colored sun hung heavy in an
amber sky. Giraffes, rhinos, and elephants lumbered along between the baobab trees while a soft light filtered through a bed of clouds and lit their way forward. Emerson looked down and saw that her leg brace was gone. The throbbing in her cheek had stopped. She could breathe freely. She felt as if she were waking up for the very first time. Skylar stood next to her, completely healed.
“Dad, how did we do that?” Emerson asked as her father landed beside her.
“In your imagination, you’re limitless,” said Oliver. “You’re free. Here you can see anything you can imagine.”
“Anything?”
“Yes,” he said. “The good and the bad.”
“The bad?” asked Emerson. The sky suddenly clouded over and turned dark. A storm was sweeping in.
“Emerson, make it go away,” said Skylar.
“How?”
“Imagine the sun.”
Just as soon as the storm appeared it was gone. She played with the idea, imagining the sky dark and then clear, over and over.
“I made all of this up? It’s not real?” she asked.
“Of course it’s real,” said Jasper. “The world of your imagination is more real than anything.”
“Does this place have a name?” Emerson asked.
“We call it the Lake of Possibility,” said Jasper. “It’s a cynefin, a place where a person feels she ought to live. It’s where nature around you feels right and welcoming.”
“It’s perfect,” said Emerson.
“It’s you,” said Oliver. “Come on. We better go. Raymond’s waiting for us.”
“I want to stay,” said Emerson.
“You’ll be back soon,” said Skylar.
Emerson pointed to the gondola above. “How do we get back up there?” she asked.
“Close your eyes, and imagine yourself floating up,” said Skylar.
“Just imagine it?”
“Like this,” said Skylar. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and as she exhaled she floated to the surface. She stepped back into the gondola, turned around, and waved at Emerson. Emerson followed her lead. To her surprise, she began to float up until she was back inside the gondola, too. Once everyone had returned, Irene steered them forward.
Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters Page 9