He wanted her to scream at him, to yell, to ground him, to get angry. But she only shook her head and bent over, grabbing his hand. She cupped it in her own.
“It’s okay, Charlie. It’s okay.” And he buried his head in her knee while he cried. She made shushing sounds and stroked his hair.
Later, he’d replay the moment in his head again and again, wishing he had done things differently. Wishing that he wasn’t so angry. Wishing that he had been the one there for Mom, instead of the other way around.
He could be here for Elliott now.
“It wasn’t your fault.” He could see Jack’s grip tighten on her hand. She swayed as Jack once again tried to pull her into the street. “Sometimes things happen and sometimes they’re terrible and unfair. But they don’t erase the awesome stuff. They don’t erase the stuff we love. Life’s not some scientific balance.”
He didn’t even know where these words were coming from. Grief group, maybe. Elliott couldn’t leave behind all the great things that had built her up and made her Elliott. Or the sad things. Dr. Miller had asked them to close their eyes and picture it one time—all the moments that had happened in their lives. Those moments were like their DNA, weaving together the fabric of who they were. They couldn’t just cut away the bad stuff and only take the good or else the fabric would be full of holes. That’s life, she had said. And you are not Swiss cheese. So when the good comes along, you’ve got to hold on to it.
He needed Elliott to hold on to the good.
“Jack loved you, Elliott,” Charlie said, his voice softer. “He needed you, and you were there. That’s who you are. When something happens, you show up.”
Elliott looked from Not-Jack to Charlie and then back again. Charlie could see Jack’s grip on her slip a little.
“We need you to be here with us now.”
Frank spoke up now, surprising Charlie. “Stay with us, Elliott.”
“The light’s going to turn soon,” Jack said. Charlie could hear the gritted teeth in Jack’s voice. “Who are you going to choose, Elly? I can make all your bad memories go away. You can stay here with me.”
Elliott closed her eyes.
A moment passed. The countdown light flashed from four to three to two.
Charlie grabbed Elliott’s hand and held it tightly in his own. Sometimes that was the only thing you could do. There was no merit badge to earn or club to join for facing these things head-on. But he had seen her courage when she hadn’t hesitated to come here with him.
Then she said, “I choose Jack. The real one. And I choose everything that comes with it.”
And with those words Not-Jack began to flicker. His shape morphed—taller, then shorter, bigger, then smaller until it was something that neither of them recognized anymore.
Then he disappeared into the twilight.
SOMETHING WORTH FORGETTING
On vacations the two things Charlie’s family always found first were the local bakery and the library. “Different kinds of treats,” Mom would say. On the beach, at a lighthouse, waiting in line at Disney, no matter where it was, she’d have a pastry in one hand and a book in the other.
At their own library, Charlie would go straight to the nonfiction section; Imogen to the play area, where they had a storytelling stage, and then to the books about Pippi Longstocking and her favorite series, the Doll People. And Mom loved anything—mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy—but she had one requirement: the characters had to be brave.
Later, when Mom was in the no-hair, tissue-paper-skin stage and he could trace the blue and red veins in her skin like a road map, Charlie asked her about it. He was asking her about everything then, rushing to fit in all his unanswered questions.
That was the tricky thing about dying, he determined.
It felt slow and fast all at once.
Mom told him that brave characters reminded her of Imogen and Charlie.
Walking up the steps to the library, Charlie felt whatever the inverse of brave was.
They had been quiet the whole rest of the way over. Elliott insisted that Frank and Charlie take the bikes—she was the fastest and ran alongside with Ruby.
He wanted to find out more about this world from Frank. He wanted to talk about what Frank had been through and what had just happened with Jack. But Frank, who had once worn that hot dog shirt and danced into class and would break out into songs he had made up on the spot, seemed to shrink under their stares. When a meteor enters the atmosphere, the force of entry and gravity wear away at the rock until there’s maybe only a pebble left when it finally hits the surface. Charlie hoped that entering back into their atmosphere wouldn’t do the same to Frank.
Charlie nodded at him. Frank seemed to take it as encouragement.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go back with you,” Frank said suddenly. Immediately, his shoulders lifted a bit, like he was now somehow lighter for saying it.
“What do you mean—” Charlie began, but then Elliott kicked him lightly in the shin. Charlie couldn’t believe, though, what Frank was saying.
“I want to go back. I really want to go back,” Frank said. Then he paused, and his eyes began to grow watery. He scuffed the step with his sneaker. Charlie noticed that his feet seemed to be crammed into them. Frank had grown down here and his shoes hadn’t.
“Well, we’ll go back,” Charlie said. He reminded himself that Frank had been stuck here, away from everyone. He needed to be patient. “We’re together now.”
“But the thing is,” Frank said. His voice quivered. “I’ve tried to go back. A lot of times, and the hatch wouldn’t let me, Charlie. I don’t know why it would be any different this time.”
Elliott took Frank by both shoulders and looked him straight in the face. “There has to be a way. We’re not leaving you behind. We’re not leaving anyone behind.” Ruby barked her agreement.
Frank sniffled and rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“Okay,” he said.
When Frank turned back toward the entrance, Charlie frowned and caught Elliott’s eye. He could tell she was thinking the same thing. They knew that Frank hadn’t been able to come back. But for whatever reason, Charlie had thought that their just showing up would make the difference. Now he wasn’t so sure. Frank didn’t have any memories left to give.
They’d have to think of something. Elliott was right: no one was getting left behind.
Charlie opened the door to the library. Normally the glass-paneled front revealed kids tucked away in corners with stacks of books piled as tall as them, but not this time. There wasn’t even a librarian at the front information desk.
Charlie wished that he had some kind of weapon with him now—a baseball bat, a hockey stick, gosh, he’d even take some kind of broom.
“I think we should split up,” Elliott said, turning to face the group. “This is a big library. We’ll cover more ground this way. Imogen still could be here.” She lifted up on her tiptoes, just a bit. Her words hung in the air—hopeful and desperate at the same time.
The library was big—three huge floors, two outdoor walled gardens. It was essentially two buildings connected by a bridge in the middle. He had to pick a place for them to begin looking. “Frank, why don’t you and Ruby check out the fiction section,” Charlie said. At least they could look in pairs—that would be safer than going alone. Frank nodded. Ruby stood right beside him, so that her body was touching his leg. Charlie knew that Ruby would look out for Frank.
“Elliott and I will go check the kids’ section with the stage. Those are the most likely places we’ll find her. We’ll meet at the front entrance in”—he glanced at his watch—“fifteen minutes. But yell if you see or hear anything.”
Frank and Ruby turned down a hallway on the left while Charlie and Elliott started for the stairs, taking them two at a time. When they reached the top, Elliott grabbed his hand and whirled him around. She had been quiet on the entire bike ride over. So had Charlie—he had thought of about nin
e thousand different things to say to her, like Are you okay?, but couldn’t seem to push the words out.
Her mouth opened once, and then closed. Then it opened again. It reminded Charlie of the goldfish behind glass at Elmer’s Pet Shop. Finally (though it was probably just a few seconds), words came out. “Charlie, I’m really sorry for what happened back there with Jack and I know that it slowed us down and I feel so awful about it. Like so, so awful. And this is all my fault just like Jack and—”
Charlie put his hand on her wrist. He could feel her heartbeat through his fingertips. He had never felt a hummingbird’s heartbeat, but he imagined that this was what it would feel like. He took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, too. For before. For the memory. And getting angry and wasting our question.” He paused. “Jack wasn’t your fault. And Imogen is not your fault. We’re going to save her.” They had to. Charlie just had to channel the brave kid Mom thought he was.
Elliott nodded once. Twice. He imagined her pushing all the feelings down to her shoes like he did. But maybe there were fewer bad feelings to push down than before. She stood up a little straighter. “Okay.” And the corners of her mouth turned up the smallest bit.
They crept along the side of one of the stacks. Charlie motioned Elliott to look ahead while he peered through the gap between the top of the books and the shelf above it. They zigzagged between the rows, taking one at a time.
Finally, a pull on his shirt. The signal.
Elliott’s eyes were wide. She pointed at a pair of chairs, both in fun shapes like the ones on Imogen’s list. They sat across from the storytelling stage, which was now littered with princess costumes and wands with stars on the top and puppets. In between the chairs was a stack of books. Charlie paged through them—he had seen them before on Imogen’s nightstand. They were some of her favorites. Then he felt the seat of one of the chairs with his palm—it was still warm.
Now Charlie wished they had stayed together. Maybe Ruby would have been able to tell them which direction to go next. “They have to be around here somewhere!” he whispered. He didn’t know whether he should shout Imogen’s name or try to sneak up behind her. He grabbed Elliott’s hand and they ran to the next section of books. Charlie kept waiting for some librarian to yell at them to stop running, but all he could hear were their footsteps.
At once, Charlie spotted a pouf of blond hair disappearing behind one of the walls ahead. He gave up on trying to be quiet. “Imogen!” he shouted. “Imogen! She just went into the film section.” He hoped that wherever Frank and Ruby were, they could hear him. Maybe they could cut her off somewhere or block the exits.
He darted down one of the aisles. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of red and then a streak of blond. They were an aisle away. Charlie’s legs pumped and his arms pumped and he couldn’t breathe, but he kept going and at the end of the aisle he leaped. His fingertips caught onto the back of Imogen’s sweatshirt.
He had her! He had her!
Not-Mom held on to Imogen’s hand, pulling her ahead. Imogen turned back. Their eyes met. Charlie’s mouth formed the word please, but no sound came out. Imogen grabbed her sweatshirt with her free hand, and she twisted it out of his grasp. Without something to hold on to, Charlie tumbled forward. His knees hit the ground first, and his worn jeans ripped. His palms hit next. Pain shot up through his arms all the way to his shoulders. Still, right before he face-planted, he managed to yell to Elliott to keep going.
And as he lay on the ground for the two seconds before action became reaction, he concentrated on the pain shooting through his body. But what hurt even worse was the look Imogen had given him when she turned around—her eyes narrowed, her face twisted, cheeks flaming. The look burned into his brain, becoming part of his memories.
That moment—along with all of the moments he had failed Mom—was another thing he wouldn’t mind forgetting.
THE ESCAPE
It didn’t seem like long at all between the time that Charlie was splayed out on the floor and then upright in the front lobby, but it was enough time for Not-Mom and Imogen to slip away.
Elliott stood just inside the door to the library, her hand cupped over her eyes, staring out into the fading sunlight, like if she looked hard enough, they’d suddenly reappear. Ruby’s fur stood on end, near her hind legs. She growled and sniffed around the entrance, trying to trace their path.
Charlie kept replaying the moment in his mind. The bit of sweatshirt in his hand. The look on Imogen’s face. She had chosen, and she hadn’t chosen him. His knees stung from his fall, but her decision hurt the most.
Frank inched closer to Charlie and put his hand on his shoulder. “Don’t give up,” he said. “It took me a long time to see all that I was missing.” Frank’s words almost broke Charlie right in half. He had missed his friend so much, and here he was sounding much more like Frank than he had in a long time.
But Imogen was still gone. And they were still in this Not-Place. Still in danger. He pulled out the photograph from his pocket and traced Imogen’s outline. He could barely see it now. But Frank, who had once been missing from the photograph, was slowly coming back into view. Maybe this had happened in the bowling alley, when Charlie had given him back a memory.
Ruby walked up next to Charlie, her fur tickling the bottom of his fingertips. “Frank’s right,” Elliott said. “We just have to find Imogen and make her understand.” She waited till Charlie looked at her. “We’re not leaving anyone behind, remember?”
“So what’s the plan?” Frank asked.
“She wanted to go to the park to play and get a pretzel, right?” Elliott said.
Charlie nodded. “There are three possible places she could get a pretzel.” He was thankful, at that moment, for what Rohan called the Summer of Pretzels, where they had tasted all the pretzels Cincinnati had to offer and ranked them according to Rohan’s carefully calibrated scale. Charlie hadn’t been able to even look at a pretzel after that for months, but it did give him a close knowledge of where everything was located. “On Madison, on Paxton, and on Logan.”
“They’ll probably go to the one on Paxton. It’s the closest to the observatory,” Elliott said. “If they’re not at the concession stand, we can cut through the park and maybe beat them there.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s go!”
The sky wasn’t all the way dark but in the glow-y in-between stage that he and Imogen loved because it meant that they got to stay outside a little bit longer. But today, Charlie wanted it to get dark outside as soon as possible. He couldn’t see all the stars in the sky this way. He couldn’t watch for them to blink out like he had on the last night with Mom. He couldn’t tell when Imogen had lost another memory.
The brick sign at the entrance of the park had two tiny spotlights on it, illuminating the lettering. Behind that, the sun had just dipped below the hill.
“The concession stand is this way,” Charlie said. The paved trail wove in between hills, and they passed the jungle gym on the left. One of the swings rocked back and forth as if someone had just jumped off it into the air. Maybe Imogen.
They pulled in front of the tiny brick enclosure that housed the Snack Shack. It had received a rating of 4.7 out of 5 on Rohan’s pretzel scale. Charlie rode up to the glass windows in the front and tried to push them open. They didn’t budge. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he pressed his face against the glass.
No oil bubbled in the fryer, and the popcorn machine only had a few unpopped kernels, though the red-and-yellow light on top glowed. And the metal hooks, where the pretzels hung when they were hot and ready, were empty.
There were no telltale bits of salt on the counter or traces of that orange processed cheese topping that Imogen loved so much.
Charlie’s stomach would have only hurt more, he thought, if he had gotten socked in the gut. His toes curled. “I think we’re at the wrong one,” he said.
But when he turned back, no one was looking at him. Instead, they were looking at a littl
e plaque nailed to a wooden pole, surrounded by tiny white flowers. To the right of that was a wooden bench. Charlie had walked by it a million times, never taking a closer look.
“It’s Edna,” Elliott said.
Charlie read the plaque aloud. “‘In memory of Harold Morrison. Friend to the park system and amateur astronomer. He and his wife, Edna, cataloged over three thousand stars before his death.’” There was a picture etched into it of Edna and Harold together on the tallest hill of the park, looking up to the sky, a telescope perched on a tripod about waist high.
And at their feet there was a dog. Charlie leaned into the picture, his nose almost touching it. He then looked back at Ruby. Then back at the picture. “Is this you?” he asked Ruby. Ruby wagged her tail in response.
There were some little differences. Ruby had thicker eyebrows, for one, and the dog in the picture had a different-shaped nose. But the patterns on the dogs’ fur and the look in their eyes were exactly the same.
Charlie wasn’t sure what this all meant. But what he did know was that it had gotten darker, and as he turned to the sky, another star disappeared. Just like it had when he had been looking through the telescope with Imogen and Not-Mom. The sky down here wasn’t like the sky in the other world, where the number of stars seemed infinite. Here, you could count the stars one by one.
There weren’t many left now.
“On to the observatory?” Charlie asked. Seeing Edna on the plaque and the dog that looked like Ruby, knowing that Frank and Elliott were down here with him, he suddenly knew that this wasn’t just about him, or about Imogen. This was about something much, much bigger and older. Something that had been happening since the beginning of time.
Edna was right. She was a lighthouse keeper, shining the path he needed to take through the dangerous waters of the Not-World. And Charlie was the captain. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to steer the ship.
“Let’s go,” he said, and they rode into the night.
The Remarkable Journey of Charlie Price Page 15