Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  “See?” he said. “I told you the dirt didn’t hate you.”

  A wave of elation washed over him. For days, he’d been trying to understand how everything worked. He felt like he’d shouted Show me! at this place a hundred times. The answer had always been no. Now Susan had gotten her yes. He had a feeling he was about to get his, too.

  “Dear Jean,” he said. “You can cheer up. We’re practically home already. Your brother, Max.”

  Jean beamed at him and Susan laughed. “Is that a promise?” she asked him.

  “Better,” he told her. “It’s a prediction.”

  Nell was not one to lose things. Unlike Kate, who regularly lost items of clothing, homework, and her backpack, or Jean, who walked out of the house and lost herself a couple of times, Nell kept track of things that mattered. She’d salvaged the old-but-still-good cushions off the living-room couch and installed them in her room to keep them from the trash, and held on to a stuffed dog her grandfather had given her long after the little girls had lost theirs.

  But of course, losing stuffed dogs wasn’t as bad as what Susan and Max did, which was to lose track of people.

  Well, one person in particular.

  At home, she was forced to remind them, regularly, that she existed. Here, it was worse. Listening to all those sleeper children saying the names of lost sisters and brothers, she’d wondered if the others would have said hers. And now, trudging behind Max and the Master Watcher, she wondered it again.

  “Is the sanctuary on top of a hill?” she’d asked the man when the ground rose again sharply past the spiky clearing where they’d spent the night.

  “No,” he’d said.

  “Then where is it?”

  The Master Watcher hadn’t even turned.

  “You’ll see it tomorrow. We won’t be able to get there until morning.”

  Nell hated when people refused to answer questions.

  “What kind of place is it?” she’d asked, trying again.

  Max had shot her a “Cut it out!” look that time. The man only turned back briefly, barely looking at her. His eyes grazed the top of her head.

  “All will become clear when we reach it,” he’d said. “Save your strength for walking now.”

  Nell had been told to keep quiet in so many ways, by so many different people, that she understood perfectly what that meant.

  She plodded through the humidity, thinking about the Master Watcher and about how, if she stopped walking right now, if she disappeared, he wouldn’t care a bit. Would the others?

  It was a panicky, rubber-ball kind of a thought that reminded her of a poem she’d learned in school, about a man who’d been swallowed by a sea creature.

  And it swallowed him whole, body and name.

  She’d thought about that line for a long time after reading it, wondering what it would be like to be erased like that, not just from the world, but from memory. Ms. Montgomery, her teacher, had said that a poet’s job was to undo that kind of forgetting. Poets saw, and remembered.

  Lying in caves at night, breathing in the chalky air and staring into stone-black darkness, Nell had found herself wondering if, after all, not just she herself but the whole world she’d known could be erased as easily and completely as the cave’s cool walls blotted out the light. So in the long hike across the mountain, Nell taught herself to be a poet.

  In her mind’s eye, she’d taken herself back home a hundred times, toured her house, catalogued the pictures on the walls and the feel of the carpet, inhaled the earthy smell of wood and cloth that greeted her at the front door every day after school. She’d gone over her mother’s face and then her father’s, remembered the sound of laughter, the way her father’s hands were shaped, and the songs her mother sang sometimes at night without knowing she was doing it.

  She had learned to pack it all away for safekeeping, so nothing she saw could be erased. And doing it had become a comfort. Now, as she walked behind the silent Watcher, she did it again, taking in the flat light-green undersides of the beech leaves that waved just over her head and noting the shriveled husks of their nuts, where they’d fallen in the sour dirt. She memorized the shaggy bulk of a hemlock, the looming, dark triangle of a white pine, and the hawk that circled over them, the outline of its body black against the sky.

  Other people might forget, but she never would.

  There once was a man with a hood

  Who thought he was better than good.

  Why a regular guy

  Should act mighty and high

  Is something Max won’t ask

  But should.

  Nell was a poet in more ways than one. Rhymes ran around in her head, and she amused herself with them when she was bored, or tired, or annoyed, all of which she was now, as she continued to walk silently behind Susan, glumly following Max and the Master Watcher.

  “What’s so great about him?” she muttered to Susan as they fell back to keep an eye on Kate and Jean. “He hasn’t even done what you and Max did.”

  “What, make peaches?” Susan said.

  “Yeah! He acts like he’s so all-powerful. You’re powerful!”

  Susan sighed. “Why, because we made lunch? How do you know that even means something here? Maybe those hooded guys can all do it! Making the window — now, that would be powerful.”

  Nell blew her sticky bangs from her eyes and swatted a cloud of gnats from the path. Max and Susan had not asked the man about windows or anything else, saying that if they wanted a real answer, an answer worth anything, they’d wait for the right moment.

  Nell wondered what kind of moment that might be. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that came up in casual conversation. Oh, and by the way, has anyone ever fallen in from another universe before? Just asking.

  Anyway, there was nothing casual about Master Watcher Lan. He wrapped himself in secrets so thick, she doubted he’d tell her what time it was without a fight. In principle, Nell liked having some secrets of her own. So she didn’t mind keeping the man in the dark about what Susan had done in the city, or how they’d gotten the peaches, even if that meant that they had to wait a little longer for answers. But she would like to have been asked her opinion. And Max was getting altogether too friendly with the man, Nell thought. When the Master Watcher spoke, which was rarely, Max looked at him as if he’d suddenly become Albert Einstein.

  She started on a second verse:

  I’d ask him myself,

  Since Max is so adoring,

  But the man has a superpower;

  He’s a champion at ignoring.

  Jean, who’d been trying to keep up with Max, now dropped back. “Can I have my peach?” she whispered. “I’m hungry.”

  Nell nodded. Having lost the blanket, she and Susan had been carrying the peaches in their pockets. She pulled one out and handed it to Jean, then took another for herself.

  “Kate,” she called. “Snack time!”

  Ahead, the man turned to look at them. She watched his eyes fasten onto the peaches.

  “Well done,” he said to Max. “You prepared. The change may have dulled your memories, but that shows a sharp mind. Wanderers starve in these woods if they don’t make ready.”

  Nell waited for Max to say something, but he only shrugged, coloring.

  She nudged Susan from behind. “Lunch,” she said, and grinned. Susan frowned over her shoulder. Way one million and eighty-seven of telling her to be quiet, Nell thought.

  They went on. To Nell’s surprise, on the edge of sunset, with the sky flame-lit overhead, they came to a place where the brown earth gave way to a green film of moss. It was so faint at first, it looked like a rash of mold on the bare ground, but soon it thickened, and after a while the forest floor came to life again, grass layering itself over the moss, and then, eventually, winding vines and low shrubs. She saw Susan grin at the thickness of it.

  “It’s done!” Susan said. “Will you look at that?!”

  For once, the Master Watcher turned their wa
y, smiling. “The barren wood is long,” he said. “But it does end. And now we may eat.”

  Nell was about to point out that she hadn’t asked his permission, when he pulled out a pouch of flat dried cakes and small fruits, and she thought better of it.

  “Did the Genius make it?” Max asked the man, motioning back to the forest. “I had a theory that he salted the wood.”

  The Master Watcher smiled again. “A good thought,” he said, settling himself beneath a maple and passing Max his portion. “But the wood was afflicted long before the city was.”

  He handed Nell a cake next, and she was about to thank him profusely, when he said, “It’s not our custom to eat in the barren wood more than we have to. It’s a cursed place, that one. But from here on, you’ll have plenty.”

  Her thank-you was a little limp after that, but she had to admit it was good, having something besides peaches and water.

  They spent that night in the open, and Nell lay beside Susan and Kate, looking up into the trees and listening to the sound of crickets.

  The Master Watcher sat, silent and awake, his back resting against a wide poplar several yards away. Max had stretched out halfway between him and the girls, with Jean scrunched against his side. For a while after everyone had fallen asleep, Nell lay thinking about the puzzle of the man, and the place he was taking them.

  Then she heard Max fidget, roll over, and sit up with a sigh. The man called to him in a low voice.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Not much.”

  “You should get some rest. We walk again in a few hours.”

  “How much farther?”

  “That depends on the speed of your walkers there.”

  Listening, Nell suppressed a groan. Max’s walkers. As though Max owned them. And did that man never answer a question straight?

  But Max didn’t pursue it. Instead he said, “What’s the sanctuary like?”

  There was silence. Then: “We don’t talk of it outside. For everyone’s protection.”

  Now it was Max’s turn to be silent. Nell wondered what he was thinking. After a moment, the Master Watcher said, “But I can promise you one thing: It will offer you more than you can imagine.”

  That’s a moment! Nell thought at Max. Ask him about windows! But in a mild voice Max only said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Twigs crunched underfoot as the man moved closer, and Nell could feel Max nearby, waiting for the right answer.

  “I mean that I’ve led my share into safety from the outside, but none like you. To change on your own, and bring four others with you! That’s evidence of great strength.”

  Nell lay unmoving. Bring four others with you? She began to fume.

  “So they can do things there, at the sanctuary?” Max asked him.

  Again, the man wouldn’t answer. “You’ll see it all soon,” he said. “Tomorrow. Best rest now, and save your strength.”

  When Max lay back down, Nell finally dropped off to sleep. It seemed only a moment later that Susan was shaking her awake. The others were sitting up, yawning, and the man waited, standing now, by the tree.

  “The moon’s risen,” he said, as if that explained things.

  They stumbled to their feet and followed. Overhead, the bright half circle of the waning moon frosted the wood, casting ivory shadows on the new growth of vines and tall grasses that covered the forest floor. Jean stumbled among them, and Susan caught her arm as Kate picked her way slowly over the dark knots of shrubs. Nell’s eyes darted from the ground to the man and back again. Why didn’t he just tell them something? she wondered. She didn’t like silence, never had been good at letting it gather between people. She would have liked to talk to Max, but now the Master Watcher would not leave his side. So after a while she dropped back, trailing behind until Susan looked back in impatience and waited for her.

  “Hurry up!” she whispered. “We’re going to lose sight of them!”

  Nell made sure the Master Watcher was out of earshot. “I heard him before, talking to Max,” she said. “He thinks Max changed us.”

  Susan studied the moonlit outline of the man’s back, thinking, but said nothing.

  “Susan,” Nell finally said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I think they’re going to try and separate us when we get there.”

  “Separate us? How do you mean?”

  “I think they’re going to take Max away.”

  Susan looked at her. “Why?”

  “Something in the way he was talking. You watch. They will.”

  Susan grimaced for a minute, then looked ahead at the Master Watcher and Max, moving on without them.

  “No,” she said. “They won’t.”

  Nell was numb with walking by the time she noticed that the woods had thinned. In the trees, the early birds were beginning to rustle and call out in their piccolo voices. She raised her head and saw the sky widen as the last of the branches receded. They clung like cobwebs to the edges of the gray expanse that had opened overhead. The moon had set and the sky was full of fading stars.

  The clearing jutted sharply upward and Nell struggled through the wet grass as the pulsing rhythm of crickets, chirping from their hidden places, marked her footsteps. She was too tired to keep climbing. Just when she was about to say so, the ground flattened. She looked ahead, but there was nothing to see. The grass rolled into darkness. Had they climbed to the end of land? She squinted in the pale light, but a murky fog obscured the way, and Nell couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. The Master Watcher sat down.

  “We wait here for dawn,” he said.

  She had grown warm on her way up the final hill, but the morning air had been cool against her skin. Now it took on the weight of a humid afternoon, without the heat. Was a storm coming? Nell wanted to ask about it, but the air seemed too heavy even for speech. So they all sat, silent, as the landscape took shape beneath the brightening sky. A milky light seeped from the horizon and showed Nell that the cliff had been an illusion. Though they sat on a peak, there was no sharp drop into open air. Instead, just below them, the ground began its slow descent, rolling smoothly into the smoky oblivion of a valley, shrouded in mist.

  The man stared into it.

  Nell looked around. The wood ringed three sides of the clearing in which they sat. The trees, dark against the rising light, seemed to nudge them toward the clouds below. And yet even as the outline of branch and mountaintop sharpened in the sunrise, the valley remained hazy, like something out of a dream.

  It drew her eyes, but she couldn’t seem to focus them. Light scattered in the mist; the sun rose overhead in an orange sky only to bounce away in a thousand directions below. The clouded valley glinted and twinkled, dazzling and deflecting her vision.

  She dragged her eyes from it and sought the Master Watcher, but he seemed in no hurry. He just sat, gazing down into the blankness of the mist.

  The weight in the air rubbed at her, and she fidgeted. She didn’t like it. Suddenly everything irritated her: the strange fog, and the quiet, and most of all the man. She hated the way he sat, expecting their silence, not answering their questions, expecting their patience. Did he know how long they’d waited?

  Nell was tired of waiting. She stood suddenly and marched down the slope toward the foggy, shrouded space. The others would follow, she decided. It was time to go.

  In a moment, she faced the line of mist. She stepped through and blinked. If the air had felt strange while she sat in the grass, here it was worse. Heavier than before, and not damp as she would have expected, but charged and vibrating with suppressed energy like the moment before a crack of thunder. Images swam before her eyes, half reflections she couldn’t quite look straight at. And there was something else. She closed her eyes and tried to hear it. Nothing. Nothing at all. Sound had drained from the world. She could hear no birds, no wind, not even the faint comfort of her own breath.

  Her eyes flew open and her stomach lurched. Nothing! White everywhere, a blank
, terrible emptiness, pouring in on her. She’d fallen down a well and been lost, forgotten, swallowed. She was gone, nameless.

  The emptiness reached inside her and erased her, bit by bit, until she felt as if she would scatter into shredded pieces, scraps of something that once had been. She stumbled, clutching at her own arms, her voice lost in the awful, hungry silence.

  A reed of sound pushed its way through and brushed at her. Something familiar.

  Her name.

  “Nell? Nell!”

  She steadied herself, tried to locate it.

  “Nell!”

  She took a step, trying to fix on it. As she did, it grew stronger.

  “This way!”

  In a few paces, she was out, and the world burst back into focus — colors, light, shapes, sounds, and the faces of Susan, Max, Kate, Jean. They were on their feet, frightened, calling. The man was standing, too, something like triumph on his face.

  She turned back and saw the mist simmering behind her.

  “It’s not a regular cloud,” she said breathlessly. “Not anything like — I couldn’t find my way.”

  Susan was standing closest. Her face had lost its color; sweat stood in drops at her hairline.

  “I went in after you,” she said. Nell had to strain to hear her. A sudden tremor shook Susan, and she caught her breath. “I lost myself. I couldn’t think.”

  “The quiet was terrible,” Nell agreed. “Made me sick.” She shuddered.

  “Quiet?” Susan said. “No, it was the noise. All those voices, pounding at me. The sound could grind you into dust!” She shook her head with a motion like she had water in her ears. “If I’d stayed another second, I wouldn’t have had anything left, wouldn’t have remembered my own name. That’s when I ran, and called you. I was afraid you wouldn’t hear.”

  “I heard,” Nell said. “Just barely.”

  Still the Master Watcher stood, silent, wearing that curious expression.

  Max turned to him. “What is it?” he asked. “What makes it that way?”

  The man smiled. “It’s the sanctuary, protecting itself.”