The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  “What is it?” DeeDee asked.

  “A message just arrived,” Gladys said. “It’s about your father. He’s had a heart attack.”

  DeeDee’s father was a former astronaut and national hero. Everyone on the rig adored him. Knowing his life was in jeopardy was a serious matter indeed.

  “Oh dear,” DeeDee said. “Is he okay?” She said it in a worried tone, which wasn’t really faking, because she was worried. She had no idea what sort of plan Luna had cooked up.

  “That’s not clear,” Gladys said. “A helicopter is arriving in thirty minutes and will take you to the hospital to be with him.”

  The helicopter arrived twenty-six minutes later, and DeeDee was shuffled aboard by two women whose voices sounded vaguely familiar. As soon as they were airborne, DeeDee heard the voice of the pilot, who sounded very familiar.

  “Dad?” DeeDee said.

  “We received some intel from your friend Luna,” he said. “We’re here to help.”

  “Do you know who Luna is?”

  “Well, I know she needs computer assistance to speak, but I also know she understands the space program better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “That’s true,” DeeDee said.

  “She thinks we need to get you somewhere safe. And I agree.”

  * * *

  From an isolated cabin deep in the Adirondacks, DeeDee spoke to Luna. Luna sent her a message through the walkie-talkie that described how to build a complicated communications device out of materials she could find at the hardware store. No one else could intercept these communications either. They would be exclusively between Luna and DeeDee.

  DeeDee’s blindness made things difficult, but she managed. Her father had food and other items secretly delivered to the cabin every week, and DeeDee reported Luna’s findings to her father, the only other soul she could trust.

  “The scientists aren’t in charge of the rig anymore,” Luna told DeeDee one afternoon as she traveled toward Uranus. “Bad things are beginning to happen.”

  “How bad?” DeeDee asked.

  “Bad enough that I’m going to send you plans to build your own spacecraft,” Luna said.

  Which she did. Immediately. But it was too late. By the time the message arrived, a few hours later, Earth had exploded. Everything and everyone on Earth was dead.

  TO BE CONTINUED …

  FRIDAY, 12/29/1989

  EARLY MORNING

  When your best friend and your boyfriend have betrayed you. When they’ve read your most private thoughts and …

  When your parents are at their wits’ end but don’t have a clue what’s going on with either of their children, with anything it seems, and …

  When the snow is falling again and you know that it’s beautiful but beauty can smother and you’ve had just about enough beauty, thank you very much, and you’ve had about enough of your brother, thank you very much, and you don’t know what you can believe, besides the science and the science is promising you that you can’t trust anyone, then you only have one option: all you can do is …

  Explode.

  I can’t sleep. I’m angry in ways I didn’t think were possible. In ways that hurt my insides. In ways that make my body shiver and my teeth throb. There are nerves in your teeth, Stella. In the core. Hot and throbby and Jesus, it gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about them.

  I’ve been pacing around my room, plotting my revenge. Okay, not my revenge, but my … my … my … soliloquy? No. My proclamation. The things I’m going to say, I mean scream, at Glen and Mandy. And at Alistair. Mostly at Alistair.

  His life has become my life. Every one of his choices has guided me to this miserable point. It’s like I’m using one of those origami fortune-tellers, but instead of telling me who I’ll marry someday, it’s telling me my future is based entirely on my little brother. Yes, the 1980s are almost over, and if the 1990s are going to be the decade of little turd brothers, then count me out. Because I don’t think I can handle it anymore.

  It’s three a.m. and I’m about to leave my room. My fingers are twitching like they’re tapping out Morse code. The message? SOS, SOS, of course.

  I can’t ever remember being so nervous about anything. If you’d told me a few months ago that talking to my little brother would make me so anxious, I’d have laughed in your face, made reference to Opposite Day, and then put Alistair in a headlock and started giving him noogies.

  A lot can change in a few months and a lot did, and now I don’t know what sort of person I’ll be confronting. One thing is for sure: I’m not knocking. When you knock, you’ve already lost an argument. You’ve announced to the person that you’re willing to let them set the terms, to invite you in or not. So, my first move in this confrontation is to bust down Alistair’s door.

  Okay, not bust down, exactly, even though kicking it in like a cop would be a cool thing to do. Totally unnecessary, however. You see, there are no locks on the bedrooms here in Casa de Cleary, a sad fact that I’ve protested for years.

  “What if there were a fire?” Dad always says. “We couldn’t get in and help you fast enough.”

  “I’ll jump out the window,” I always respond.

  “We’re not gambling our fates on windows that sometimes stick,” he counters. “Don’t worry. We’ll respect your privacy.”

  For the most part, they have. Mom has slipped in a couple of times when I’ve overslept and was going to be late for school, but she’s always apologized later. You see, there’s a Frantic button that gets pushed on moms when you’re late for school, and it causes them to do things like pour Cheerios into your lunch bag and apple juice in your cereal bowl. You can’t really blame them for acting irrationally. I mean, God forbid your child misses homeroom or, gasp, ten minutes of first period Earth Science.

  I guess the Frantic button has been pushed on me too. Only I’m not going to be apologizing for my intrusion. My fingers are still twitching as I rehearse the first few lines of my tirade, saying them into a pillow and getting louder with each word.

  For two days, I’ve been trying to figure out why you lied and stole from me, but it seems that everyone lies and steals from me now, so it means you’re just like everyone else. A. BIG. FAT. LOSER.

  I’ve gone over it three times. I’m ready.

  A LITTLE LATER IN THE MORNING

  I don’t have time to write, only to say that I plowed through that door and started to holler, “For two days—” But then I clamped my mouth shut. Because there she was, wrapped in a blanket, sunken into the beanbag chair.

  Fiona Loomis.

  THE MEMORY OF FIONA LOOMIS

  My head hurts. Behind my eyes, deep inside. I can hardly think. I can hardly breathe.

  We were out in the road, you and I. Isn’t that right? And I kissed you, didn’t I? Or did you kiss me? And the air was spinning. Was there snow? Yes, there was. The snow was spinning, and I was drawing pictures in the snow on the road. You were telling me to get away from my uncle. I was telling you to get away from Charlie.

  Now you’re telling me it’s almost eight weeks later?

  This doesn’t make any sense. This … It’s like you’re saying I’m in Thessaly, but this isn’t really Thessaly. This is some weird other version of it. Some version where I don’t belong. But you are here and Keri is here and this sure looks like your room.

  Where’s the poster with the bikini babe? Prudence, right? That’s what we call her. Did you take it down? I hope you did. I’m glad, because it was a stupid poster. It didn’t belong here.

  I belong here, don’t I? I’m supposed to be here, aren’t I?

  I need water. Do you have water?

  God, it’s like this isn’t anything like a dream, but this isn’t anything like the real world. What did…? Someone did something to me. To my memories. To be … To be … To be …

  I saw a flamingo. Or was it a heron? A big bird. A strange beak. I remember that. And a hammock. Ice cream. Lots of ice cream.

 
And eyes. Big eyes staring at me.

  It’s so cold here. Is it always this cold?

  Keri, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. But you look younger. Both of you. Is it that I got older? I know you showed me the newspaper with the date and all that, but how could the year almost be over? There hasn’t been Thanksgiving. There hasn’t been Christmas. There hasn’t …

  Why are you looking at me like that? Are you sad? Are you … I’m not sure I want to do this anymore. Turn off the tape.

  Now. Now!

  SATURDAY, 12/30/1989

  AFTERNOON

  Insanity. For almost two straight days.

  I’ve hardly eaten, I’ve hardly slept, I’ve hardly had a chance to even pick you up, Stella, let alone comment on the aforementioned insanity.

  To see Fiona’s face was so horribly wonderful. Wonderful for obvious reasons. Where the horrible part comes in is when I began to imagine what she was going through. Her brain was obviously scrambled. Beyond scrambled. Pulverized.

  I put her back together.

  That’s what Alistair said about Sunita Agrawal, the girl from Nepal, the Astronomer. And that’s what it felt like with Fiona. She’d seemed … put back together. But not put back together particularly well. Watching her slumped in the beanbag, I couldn’t help but think of the Candy Cane Girl.

  At some point, I lost track of the exact course of events, but I know that as soon as I opened that door, Alistair pulled out his old Fisher Price tape recorder and we made a tape of what Fiona said. And as soon as the tape stopped, I went upstairs and woke my parents. Then there were cops. Then there were Loomises. First Fiona’s mom, red-eyed, bone-white, and shell-shocked. Then her dad, crying, which I never expected to see from that guy. He collapsed on a chair in our living room and buried his splotchy face in his arm. Everyone was basically a mess. You can’t for a single second blame them for that.

  Word spread fast, maybe through Mrs. Carmine, who I’m convinced has secret tunnels that lead from house to house and hides in every closet in the neighborhood to collect gossip. Helicopters were the roosters for the morning, hovering overhead and waking everyone at dawn. The news trucks that we knew so well were back too, parked at their favorite spots along the roadsides and in vacant lots.

  Alistair had the tape for a full two hours, long enough for me to listen to it again and jot it down, but when the police questioned us, we were forced to hand it over.

  “Where again did you find her?” they asked Alistair multiple times.

  “Like I told you,” he said. “She showed up at my window and I helped her climb in. She was cold, so I gave her a blanket. We knew that it was important to have evidence of what she said, so Keri and I started the tape recorder and let her talk.”

  “And she didn’t say anything else?” they asked.

  Alistair shook his head and said, “She was confused.”

  I nodded in agreement. The understatement of the decade.

  The police didn’t speak to us for all that long, though they said they’d probably want to speak to us again. They were too busy with Fiona and her parents, who they shuffled off to some undisclosed location.

  The TV has been on in our house all day. I’m not sure who turned it on, but no one has bothered to turn it off. Whenever I glance over at it, I see either a news report about Fiona or some show counting down The Best of the Eighties! Music videos. Movies. TV shows. Et cetera. It’d be fun to watch that fluff if I didn’t have so many other thoughts and images clogging my head. The Worst of December 29 and 30!

  The image of Fiona in the beanbag chair, befuddled and terrified, miles away from the daring and confident little Heavy Metal Fifi who had my brother wrapped around her bony finger. It crushed me and is still crushing me to be lost in her vacant eyes.

  The image of her parents hugging her while she shivered and wept and the cops loomed in the doorways of every room of our house in a way that only cops loom.

  The image of the Dwyers, standing in the road, peering over the barrier of police cruisers, asking, “Anything? Anything on Charlie?”

  Nothing. Nothing on Charlie.

  EVENING

  In the madness of the last two days I haven’t had much time to revisit my accusations of Alistair. Did he read my diary? Well, it seems that Mandy and Glen did, so it’s certainly believable that he did too. Did he steal ideas and make up stories in some weird scheme to win me over? A bit far-fetched, I know, but consider the alternative. Do I care anymore, now that Fiona is back? Not really. And yet when I saw the unopened phone bill on the kitchen table this evening, I knew I had to put the investigation to rest.

  I snatched the bill and the cordless phone and headed for the bathroom. I locked the door and turned on the shower, but I didn’t shower. I sat on the floor and tore open the envelope. I found a number on the bill that had a ton of digits. This had to be it. I dialed quickly, so I wouldn’t chicken out, and I let it ring a few times. Fourteen and a half hours ahead, if I remembered correctly. It would have been Sunday at noon where I was calling, a perfectly reasonable time to answer a few questions about what the hell is going on.

  The voice that answered was low and scratchy, a just-woken voice, or maybe an exhausted one, considering what time it was there.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m calling to speak to Jenny Colvin, please.”

  A pause, and then, “Is this a joke?”

  I knew at that moment who I was speaking to. The same woman who answered the phone before. Jenny’s mother, I assumed. She had sounded so sprightly the last time, so happy, but now …

  “I’m not joking,” I assured her. “I have a quick question for Jenny, is all.”

  “So do I, dear,” she said, though the dear was anything but sweet. “Why won’t she come home?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you’re having a go at me … then I … certainly don’t appreciate it,” she said, the words muddled by sobs.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “You’re saying she’s not home?”

  “Hasn’t been home since before Christmas.”

  I drew the phone away from my face. What I was doing felt absolutely filthy. My hand lingered over the button to hang up, and yet I didn’t press it. I drew the phone back to my ear.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”

  “Not that it surprises us,” the woman said. “Her sis had these sorts of problems too, spouting fantastical nonsense, threatening to run off and never come back. But she never went through with it. She grew up and got better. Jenny, on the other hand, always has to outdo her sis. I guess that includes going through with the running-off bit.”

  “Her sister?” I asked.

  “Sigrid,” the woman said.

  I hung up immediately. I tore up the phone bill and tossed the paper in the toilet. Then I flushed away the evidence.

  THE BEGINNING

  You can survive without a soul. Princess Sigrid did, after all. The Dorgon had consumed Tom Rondrigal, who had taken Sigrid’s soul into the afterlife with him. The Dorgon had then consumed Sigrid’s trusty advisor, Po, leaving the princess entirely alone in the onyx tower. The cook still put a drop of that potion of forgetfulness in Sigrid’s evening stew, and her short-term memory was wiped clean every day.

  Even though she didn’t have a soul, Sigrid still had feelings, but like her new memories, they were fleeting. They abandoned her within moments of her feeling them. They never imprinted themselves on her because there was nowhere to imprint.

  So Sigrid indulged in nostalgia, in the old memories and feelings she hadn’t lost. Those included her journey into other worlds, into other bodies—her time as a girl made of candy canes, as an alien, as a dark and disturbing joke, and as thousands of baby birds. There was no doubt that the journey had been a harrowing and horrible experience, but she began to miss it. That’s the thing about the harrowing and the horrible: you tend to underestimate just how harrowing and horrible they are.
You tend to tell yourself that feeling something is always better than feeling nothing.

  And that’s what Sigrid told herself. Her life was now as bad as it gets, as empty as it gets. Having feelings and memories that didn’t last was torture. Confusion, anger, and even pain were better than numbness.

  So one morning, she opened the hollowed-out book that concealed that old Dorgon potion, the one that allowed her to live other lives, and she put a drop of it on her tongue.

  Poof!

  She entered the body of a girl named Kerrigan Cleary. Keri for short.

  Keri was a mess of a girl, a bubbling cauldron of emotion and confusion. As Sigrid entered her body, she was flooded, overwhelmed with feelings. Immediately, Sigrid regretted her decision to take the potion. Having no emotions was bad, but being torn apart by emotions was perhaps even worse. What had she gotten herself into?

  Sigrid knew that the only escape from a body was death, and she certainly didn’t wish such an awful fate on Keri. The girl was a wreck, but she was also sweet, and very very funny, thank you very much. So Sigrid decided to try to make the best of the situation. She’d do whatever she could to help young Keri.

  Since Sigrid no longer had a soul, all she could offer Keri was her old memories. They didn’t seem like much, but they energized Keri. They coursed through her mind and emerged at the end of her pen. They became stories, written down in a diary, and those stories accomplished two things.

  They made Sigrid feel like she had a soul again.

  They made Keri feel less anxious, more in control of her life. Kinder. More understanding.

  And together, the two girls got stronger.

  Now, when Keri sat on her bed, staring at that diary and asking herself, What does it all mean? she could tell herself a new mantra.

  “Who cares, as long as it’s working.”

  SUNDAY, 12/31/1989

  MORNING

  We’re all overjoyed and we’re all terrified. We don’t know what the hell is happening.

  The phone rang all morning, like a scream in a haunted house. Mom and Dad fielded the calls because the calls were for them. Until there was a call for me. Mom handed me the phone without saying who it was.