“Splashing?”
“My feet were in the water.”
“Oh.”
Susan waited, but Kate didn’t elaborate. She was that kind of kid, always dreaming of strange places and people calling from out of thick trees. Susan wondered if she ought to tell Mom.
Kate lifted her head slightly, and her hair brushed the bottom of Susan’s jaw. “I wasn’t scared,” she said. Kate had a knack for reading her intention even in the dark, and somehow, with Kate, Susan didn’t mind. “You don’t have to worry about it.” Kate waited, head up, for Susan to answer.
“But you wanted to come in here anyway, I guess?”
Kate rested her head back on Susan’s arm.
“Just for a little,” she said drowsily. “And besides, Jean was talking in her sleep.”
Susan smiled. Sleep, warm and comfortingly heavy, crept over her again, and she closed her eyes. “Maybe she was having funny dreams, too.”
She fell back to sleep thinking what an odd twenty-four hours it had been. She swore to herself tomorrow would be different.
She was usually very good at keeping her word.
The exile found company only in dreams. Beneath tall, unfamiliar trees, others would appear: a sunny-haired girl who sat on the edge of a shining pool, her bare feet in the water. Another, darker, older, who stood in the dappled shade, eyes on the blazing sky.
The ancients had spoken of a place outside time, a whispering orchard, a sparkling wood, a dream that lived. And yet if they had spent nights walking its paths of wisdom, the exile was given just moments, flashes that drifted away with the dawn.
What was to be found on waking? Only the hard sky over the mountain, the cottage, the trees, the garden, and the ever-present muttering of the valley, with its undertone of warning, its reminder of punishment. Few came through it, and those only reinforced the solitude — watchers, radiating judgment harsh as summer heat, and the broken ones, who screamed their agony into the wind before disappearing through the trees, beyond help or hope.
The sounds of exile were few. No voices, no words.
Speech now was folded into books, the aging pages polished by the turning of many hands. In the silence, the exile clung to these pages, with their smell of years, their prophecies of doom and of promise.
Doom had come. The exile waited now for the promise.
Do you know how much electricity gets used on the shortest day of the year?” Max asked Susan as he mixed his instant oatmeal at the kitchen counter the next morning.
Susan raised an eyebrow at him. This was Max’s peace offering, she knew, a useful bit of information that he thought would cheer her up.
“Don’t you mean longest night of the year?”
“Same thing.”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, fine. Longest night, then.”
She decided to accept his apology.
“No, how much?”
She scooted over on the kitchen bench to make room for him. Their house was old, and the kitchen seemed older than the rest of it. The short Formica-topped table jutted out from the window, and two benches sat on either side of it, a setup that Dad said was like a diner at a truck stop. To get in or out of the seats closest to the window required climbing over one or two siblings or the high back of the bench, which sat only about half a foot from the side of the fridge. And yet Susan favored it. She loved to sit by the window and rest her head against the cool glass.
Max grinned as he sat down. “Five thousand megawatts. But of course that’s an estimate. But guess when people use even more? In summer. Guess why? Air-conditioning. Much more wasteful than lights. Or at least it was last time I checked.”
Outside, the snow was melting. December never seemed sure it was really winter, no matter what the calendar said, and the day had dawned unexpectedly sunny. Susan pressed her forehead into the glass. Still cold enough to ease the ache there from having an interrupted night’s sleep.
“You okay, Susan?” Mom asked her. She had come into the kitchen with Kate’s backpack, which always managed to get left behind when it was time to go to school.
“Just tired,” Susan said. She didn’t mention why.
“Me, too,” Max said. “I feel like last night lasted longer than normal.”
“Ha-ha,” Susan said.
“No, I mean it. Like it was full of dreams. And not my usual ones.”
“What, no spaceships involved?” Mom asked. She plopped a carton of orange juice down on the table, followed by two small glasses. “Drink up — you’ll feel better.”
“More like a lot of trees,” Max said, pouring himself some juice. “No idea why. Maybe it’s because I’m taking earth science.”
The word dreams pinged like a small bell in Susan’s mind. She paused, thinking of Kate, then for a moment had the hazy feeling that she’d seen . . . she didn’t know what. It evaporated as soon as she focused her attention on it. She shook her head. She almost never remembered dreams, anyway. Probably it was only her imagination, filling things in for her. She poured herself some juice.
Jean came in then, climbing up to sit across from Susan at the table. She set her Barbie doll next to her cereal bowl.
“Kate!” she called. “Barbie’s ready for breakfast! See?” She showed Max. “She’s a birthday Barbie.”
He looked distinctly uninterested.
“She was born in a factory,” Max said. “I doubt she has a birthday.”
Jean wrinkled her nose. “It’s for pretend, Max,” she said. “And so she can have a pretty dress.”
She admired the dress for another minute before standing up to pour herself some cereal, giving Barbie a shower of cornflakes at the same time.
“You’ll get her dirty!” Kate said from the doorway. She carried her own matching doll, which she held against her chest. “And you said you’d keep her nice!”
“We’ll give them baths tonight,” Jean told her. “And maybe a haircut. That’s part of getting ready for the party.”
“No haircuts,” Kate said, looking alarmed.
Susan grinned into her orange juice. Jean had recently restyled one of her skirts (it needed to be shorter), a pair of new shoes (she didn’t like the straps), and her own hair. Where she’d once had longish dark waves, she now had a short bob and bangs that fell half an inch above her winged eyebrows. She’d been on her way to convincing Kate to let her give her a trim when Mom confiscated the scissors.
“Well, a bath, anyway,” Jean conceded.
Susan watched Max roll his eyes, and Jean grinned across the table at him.
“Max, write me a letter.”
Max gave Susan a sidelong glance that begged sympathy for his long suffering.
“Not now.”
“Please? A short one.”
“I don’t have a piece of paper.”
“Letters” was a favorite game of Jean’s, which she’d devised after having received one from Grandpa the year he’d been on a trip and missed her fifth birthday. She’d heartily agreed with him that messages on paper lasted longer than a phone call. She’d then gone on a campaign to get everyone to write her letters, and in a fit of generosity, Max had made the mistake of complying.
“Say one, then. Like, pretend you’re reading it.”
Max grunted, but Susan knew that for all his bluster, he wouldn’t refuse her. He rarely did.
“Dear Jean, Enjoy your breakfast. Your brother, Max.”
Jean beamed at him, and Max drained his juice and finished his oatmeal in silence.
Nell joined them last of all. She, too, looked like she’d had a long night. She glanced moodily out the window. “I wish it would snow again,” she said. “Then I could sleep late.”
“It’s a short day,” Susan told her. “It’ll be night before you know it.”
And it was. Before the afternoon was half over, the sky had turned a deep, evening blue. Susan went into the family room and stood by the big window, looking out at Mrs. Grady’s house next door.
It had been another peculiar day. Standing near her locker at lunchtime, she’d been sure someone was looking over her shoulder, waiting for her to turn. When she did, nobody was there. It had made her feel funny again, off-kilter.
They all seemed to feel it. On the way home, Max and Nell had kept silent. They were so quiet at supper that Dad put his hand on everybody’s foreheads, but no one had a fever.
“Winter blahs,” he concluded. “And it’s only the first day.”
Susan did what she always did when she felt unsettled. She found a book. But before she opened it, she stood at the family-room window and watched Mrs. Grady’s ever-present kitchen light filter through the colored figurines in the window across the way.
Mrs. Grady did not believe in curtains, a fact Susan knew well because Mrs. Grady was a woman who liked to announce her likes and dislikes as if she were carrying a bullhorn. Collecting the Gradys’ garbage cans one day, Susan had been stopped by the pronouncement that horizontal stripes would never again be a part of Mrs. Grady’s wardrobe; apparently they made her behind look like a beach ball. Curtains had been the subject of at least three separate bulletins, because according to Mrs. Grady, despite her disapproval of them, Mr. Grady insisted on them. Susan doubted this. She’d barely ever heard the man say a word, let alone voice an opinion. Insisting on something seemed a stretch.
But it was true that all the Gradys’ windows were covered except this one, in the kitchen, the one filled with colored glass. For a second more, Susan stood looking into the blue, at the hazy rainbow that glimmered in the space between the houses.
Then she opened her book.
Because she was reading, she didn’t much note when the others came in. She was only half aware of Max sitting down at the table to do his homework. She did look up when Nell came in, wrapped in a blanket cocoon. But that was only because Nell plopped down beside her on the old maroon sofa, letting her blanket fall across the pages of Susan’s book.
“Hey!” Susan said.
Nell shot her a look. Susan huffed and retreated to the table, her back to the window. Kate and Jean trooped in then, their matching Barbies fresh from the promised bath and once again dressed for a party. They sat down on the floor and began to play.
And this was the moment the curious feeling that had nudged Susan for two days blossomed into something more.
On the couch, Nell bolted upright, letting her blanket cocoon fall open.
“It’s out! Mrs. Grady’s light’s gone!”
Max didn’t turn.
“She’s probably blown a fuse,” he said. He shot a wry half grin at Susan. “But let’s call the police anyway. I’d love to see her face when they come.”
Susan twisted around in her chair to look and blinked in surprise. It wasn’t just the light.
The whole square of Mrs. Grady’s lit kitchen had disappeared, and their own window now glowed a brilliant cobalt that drew the last of the light into it and pushed it back again. The glass seemed to curve outward, a dark mirror casting their faces back in shimmering curves.
In reflection, the room looked oddly out of shape. Susan swiveled back to see it and found everything in place — family pictures on the wall, the old couch, the overstuffed recliner, the long oval table. She glanced at Max, who was still bent over his homework, his back to the window. Kate and Jean had noticed, though. Gripping their Barbies, they had gotten up to gape at the glass.
Susan could almost feel the pulse of the glowing light behind her. She turned back to it.
“Max,” she said quietly. “Look.”
Her tone must have caught him, because he didn’t argue. He turned, drew in a sharp breath, and stood up.
“What in the world?”
Susan took a step toward the window and tried to peer through the reflection. On the other side of the glass, Mrs. Grady was indeed gone. Her window, her kitchen, the old grill, the stairs — the neighborhood itself seemed to have winked out of existence. In its place stood a wide old tree, black as a charcoal drawing against blue glass.
“That can’t be,” Susan said.
“What happened to it? Did something explode?” Nell asked. Cautiously, she crept from the couch to stand beside the twins, clutching her blanket around her neck.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Kate said.
“Explosions leave a pile of house,” Max told them. “This is more like an optical illusion. Maybe somebody’s playing a practical joke on us. You know, beaming something at the glass.”
Susan thought for a minute, then ran to the bathroom, with its small window that faced Mrs. Grady’s kitchen. Outside, the colored glass still glowed from the other house as the neighborhood settled placidly into the night. She squinted into the evening light, looking for Max’s practical joker, but there was no one. Puzzled, she walked back into the family room. The others hadn’t moved. They all stood staring at the window. It smoldered like a blue coal.
“It’s normal out there when I look from the bathroom.”
“And did you see who’s doing it?” Max asked her.
“No one is. No one’s outside.”
“Makes no sense. It’s got to be an optical illusion.”
“Why does it bend out like that?” Jean asked. She came around the table and past them, her hand extended toward the window.
“Don’t!” Nell said. “It could burn you!”
Max shook his head. “Do you feel any heat coming off it? Optical illusions don’t burn.” He followed Jean to the window.
Jean leaned up on the sill and poked at the blue curve with her Barbie. The doll’s blond hair sank into the glass like a waffle dipped in syrup.
“Wow!” Max said. “That’s some trick.” He poked the glass, too, and his finger disappeared in blue up to the knuckle.
They all had to try it then. They climbed onto the wide sill, probing the window with hands, resting cheeks on it. On the other side, the sky was the same deep blue they’d seen over Mrs. Grady’s house, but where her house should have been, the lone tree now stirred in a faint wind.
As she had in the morning, Susan pressed her forehead to the glass. This time it was warm — soft as wax left in the sun.
She pulled back, startled, then cautiously leaned in again.
The window dissolved.
Susan pitched forward with a gasp. The others toppled on either side of her, Max hiccupping with surprise, Nell grabbing her blanket as it unrolled and released her into open air, Kate and Jean letting the sleek pink Barbies fly from their hands into the dusky sky.
Susan landed on all fours in the grass beneath the tree, and it was summer grass, thick with the smell of growing and damp with the settling night. Across a wide expanse, she could see the dark edge of a forest.
Her brain seemed to stutter in her head, and for a moment it was emptied of words.
Nell didn’t have that problem.
“This is an optical illusion?” she gasped, sitting up and brushing grass from her hands. “Remind me what optical means again?”
Max didn’t answer. He just gawked.
“Wow,” Kate said, looking around. “How did we do that?”
Just in front of Susan, Jean rolled to her feet and stood up.
“Our window’s still there!”
Susan turned to look as Jean scooted over to collect her Barbie. Soon they were all standing, squinting upward.
Above them, Nell’s blanket hung from a rectangle of light, a cloth waterfall tumbling from a boxy sun.
“Come on!” Nell said. “We can climb!”
Words flooded back into Susan’s head, the primary one being home. By the light of the window, she saw Max look with interest at the strange landscape around them, and a fresh surge of panic brought her voice back.
“Come on, Max! We’ve got to get back up there!”
He hesitated, then glanced at the little girls and nodded. Nell had already grabbed the bottom of the blanket, and now Max did, too, putting out a foot to brace himself against the wall tha
t must be there. But there was no wall, and after a moment, no window, either, because with a sharp pop, the blanket came loose, fluttering down upon them. The light blinked out.
The window was gone.
Nell might look something like an elf, but nobody could accuse her of sounding like one. Susan often complained that standing next to Nell when she yelled felt like being blasted by a train whistle, or a rocket launch. She was grateful for it now, though, when Nell opened her mouth and started hollering for Mom and Dad. Nobody within a block’s distance could fail to hear Nell when she really tried.
“MOM! DAD! COME TO THE WINDOW!”
Nell paused, and they all waited. No response.
Everyone joined in for the second round, screaming themselves hoarse. Susan thought that if Mrs. Grady hadn’t had apoplexy when her kitchen disappeared, she’d definitely be calling the police now.
But not even an echo answered them. Their calls died on the wind of the strange, empty field, lost in the border of the distant wood.
Finally, they collapsed beneath the tree, stunned into silence.
Darkness had truly fallen by then. It was not the darkness Susan knew, pocked with streetlights and friendly, bright-eyed houses, sliced through with the headlights of moving cars and the occasional taillights of an airplane overhead. This was a tar-black curtain, mottled by the blotted shapes of the far-off wood.
Above, stars glittered like crushed glass.
“There are so many of them!” Kate said. “Are there always so many?”
Susan had never seen such a sky. She searched for the Three Sisters, the line of stars that sat in Orion’s Belt, but she could not make out a single familiar constellation.
“They look different because there aren’t any city lights. Those hide most stars,” Max said. “It’s called light pollution.” This last he added only faintly. His voice dribbled to nothing beneath the shock of that strange sky. In the tree, crickets chirped sleepily.
“It’s so different,” Susan said. “Maybe you’re right — maybe we can’t see the ones we know because there are too many.”
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