by Dan Noble
After morning snack, she’s fingering the necklace, telling me what the story says, excited like she’s just seeing it for the first time. She actually believes she is, which I can understand, if she too, is going to the book world, making changes to reality and then returning to an unrecognizable world, the way I have been. I can see her eyes widen as she imagines experiencing the winter wonderland ice skating contest herself. She has a special talent for imagination, though children in general are excellent at it. I bet she’s better than I ever was.
There are questions: what if she can’t come back? What might change when she does? I don’t know how it works. I collapse into a kitchen chair just outside the family room, when suddenly, I feel a kind of déjà vu. Here I was on this chair, but Kennedy’s cancer was just a scare—a product of an annual check and my imagination. He was totally healthy. If I’m going mad and a healthy Kennedy is the outcome, that would be worth it, wouldn’t it? Is there another reality I can reach through the book world, in which Kennedy is not sick? It feels like a possibility within my grasp.
I clasp my strangely empty belly. Look at the prescription bottle of Clomid with my name on it. These things are real now, I tell myself. However I got here, I must keep it together for my child. That is the most important thing. I try to catalog the events of the past week: the receipt, the strange day of tailing Kennedy, catching him with my father, the miscarriage I don’t recall, the incredible Gatsby sex, Rose’s mix-up with The Magic Charm Book. Did all of that actually happen? Some of it? It was so surreal and impossible to pick apart.
For a second, I’m unsure. What does your instinct tell you, Millie? I close my eyes and distinctly remember the cheese man talking about the town that takes down its sign. Of course, it happened. And so did the Gatsby sex and the conversation with the photographs.
I return through the doorway to the sitting room and lift Rose on my lap, open the book, tell my daughter the truest thing I’ve ever said. “Mommy loves you more than anything in this world.”
I turn and allow her to head back to the floor, where she’s struggling to go, as a branch scrapes the window pane. I don’t know how long I’m staring at it. Again I’m watching Heathcliffe. I’ve got the bloodied rock in my hand. I see something more—a body, a woman’s body. I yell out “what have I done?” And suddenly I’m back on the couch, looking at the branch, which is still scratching its hypnotic sound. But when I turn Rose is gone. The necklace is stretched out over the pillow, a perfect vertical, in her place. It’s exactly how I remember seeing it the last time. She’s gone into the book world. It must be.
I barrel to the sofa and grab it, stroke it as if it has the answers.
“Rose? Rose! Where did you run off to?” I look all over, screaming her name and shaking. I’m panicked.
And then it hits me. What does your instinct tell you, Millie? Yes. She’s inside The Magic Charm Book.
My daughter is by herself. Sure, she’s in a world where candy canes hang from trees and everyone is wearing pink, but she’s alone.
Eventually, though, the panic begins to recede. In its place is something akin to wonder. She’s there, that impossible there. She’s there and I was there.
I know what I know. I know that’s where she’s at, and it’s not just because the necklace has landed exactly as I recall. But I don’t want to know because if I know that, I know what I did to Mother was a real thing. A crime. And I don’t deserve anything good in my life. I feel it all slipping from me.
I shake it off and return to the matter at hand: Rose, in the storybook. Everything is so wondrous to kids. Does she even notice how she’s not imagining the skating rink’s surface turning pink, not imagining she’s Kelly, winning the contest, but actually is Kelly winning the contest?
So, that’s where we would be, at the Woodside Rink, and it’s the first snowfall of the season. Could she imagine Kennedy there so strongly that in a manner, he goes too? Could he “leave” his cancer there and come back healthy, the way my ankle healed? It seems too simplistic for it to work that way. And yet, it’s beautiful, and meaningful, and would make for such a significant reality.
I sit, silently, next to the spot where Rose disappeared. For a while, I hold my arms out for her, staring at the book, just in case she tumbles out violently the way I always imagined Mother doing. But nothing happens. I catch my reflection in the window pane. I look crazy. I tried so hard to leave this part of my life behind. And yet here I am. And I’m trembling, this time, my legs shake too.
The hyper colors wash over the room, the noise, the pulsing in my head. And then I black out.
17
KENNEDY
“Sir, I want to apologize for Millie showing up the other day. I know it must have been upsetting for you.” I’m at my wife’s father’s house.
“Nothing to apologize for, Kennedy. I have no relationship with my daughter. Whose fault could that be but mine? I fucked it up with her. Did it hurt to have that right in my face after all these years? You bet. But it made me realize something. I can’t go behind her back anymore. I have to come out with it. She deserves to know the truth.”
“But, sir.”
“Please stop fucking calling me sir. I’m not in the damned military. Never did an honorable thing in my life. But I will now.”
“But, Greg.”
“Don’t ‘but Greg’ me either. I’m telling her and that’s that.”
“I’m dying.”
Finally, something to silence him. It’s powerful, this, strange as that sounds. I will not be embarrassed for using it.
“You’re going to leave her?”
“That’s a strange way to put it.”
Mr. Burns shrugs.
“You know where I stand on Millie’s need to know when it comes to Emily,” I say.
“Yes, I do. That’s what you were against. Found the need to come here and make me swear never to tell Millie the truth, even though I already had no relationship with my daughter. You told me you’d care for her. And now you’re leaving her.”
He was right. What could I say to that?
“Let me guess, now that you’re at the bottom of the barrel, things look a bit different, am I right? You’re a real schmuck, Kennedy, you know that? And I’m a schmuck for ever listening to you in the first place. I should have told the truth.”
“You believe what you believe, sir.” He doesn’t verbally correct me this time, instead just shakes his head.
“You do what you’ve gotta do, Kennedy. Not that anyone could ever tell you what to do. But I’m telling my daughter the truth. She deserves to know.”
What’s Millie going to do when she finds out the truth? She’s going to fucking hate me, that’s what. And she’s not going to cope. And despite every ugly thing I’ve done, every lie I’ve told, I love her more than life itself. And that makes it right. I’ll have to come up with something.
18
MILLIE
An hour and a half later, I’m conscious again. This time, I feel for my belly right away. It’s still indeterminate, but there’s a distrust in my craw. I know there is reason to question. Everything.
“Rose! Rose!” I yell all around the house, outside, down the block and back. She’s still gone. The necklace is where she left it. Can she still be in the book world? I’m sick with panic. Rose hasn’t returned and Kennedy is due home any minute. How will I explain this? Our child is missing.
He’ll want to call the police. Of course, he will. But I can’t let him. She’s fine. She’s in the book world. Still, there’s the echo, deep down in my bones, things are not right. I recall the last period of blackouts and paranoia, and the extremes I drove myself to; I see the rock, and the things that must have happened at my hand with it, and I try to shut it out. You are nothing but the lovely woman I see before me.
I pace the living room, holding the necklace in one hand and my not-pregnant abdomen in the other. Please come back, Rose. Please come back. The book’s splayed out on the floo
r like an inanimate object. Its dreamy drawings designed to attract young girls to the wonders of make-believe. All so innocent. Surely, it’s me who’s the dangerous one.
19
KENNEDY
I sit in the car for ten minutes. I don’t know what to expect inside the house. The lights are on in the family room, which means Rose and Millie are in there, or Rose is in there, watching Sesame Street while Millie cooks us dinner, worrying that I’m dying, and most likely busting to work out how to cross over into her “book world” to cure me, all the while worrying why reality keeps changing on her, and whether I’ll think she’s crazy.
And she doesn’t even know the worst of it, my involvement, my deception. Unless her father has already called and told her. Days ago, our lives were perfect. Happy, healthy, in love, awaiting our second child. Now look at us. And that’s because it was all built on lies. But she’s not going to hate me. She will see this is right. It’s even beginning to feel true, the IVF, the bottle of Clomid I mocked up with some sugar pills. Why couldn’t it be?
The door is unlocked and I open onto a scene of fright. Millie is pacing along the couch. She’s holding that same junky kid’s necklace I told Rose to pretend never existed like it’s a magical charm. She’s big on symbols, my wife. Piles loads onto them. She must have had some backup necklaces though; this is the woman her father believes is a danger. I have to feel her out so I know how to play it.
“What’s wrong? Where’s Rose?”
Millie opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.
“Come here.” I lead her to the couch. “Sit down and tell me what happened.”
She sits and stares at Elmo, who’s muted, carrying lots of things too heavy for a puppet to lift.
“Rose is gone.” Then she looks at me, her expression pure terror. Oh no. I’ve made a misstep already.
“Are you sure she isn’t just having a nap?”
“What do you mean? I just said our daughter is missing.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“Where do you think she is?”
We stare each other down, neither speaking.
Then, finally, she spits out a lot of stuff that’s spot on about not remembering anything about starting IVF, about her haircut, and then mixes it up with an incomprehensible story about Rose. The trigger word that gets me terrified is book. When Millie starts talking about books, looking this distressed, I know she’s in trouble.
“Is Rose okay?” I ask. Oh god, oh god, Mr. Burns was right. Why have I allowed this to go on so long?
At that moment, I hear Rose shout from upstairs. “Help!” she yells. “I can’t open my door.
Millie and I start, turn to each other, eyes bulging. I run first, she follows. Please let her be okay, I think. Please. At the top of the landing I see a strange sight. Millie’s barricaded Rose inside her room. There are at least half a dozen items shoved up against the door. There’s the chair from our bedroom, the sideboard, an ottoman, one of Emily’s giant blackboards, and on top of that, a pile of immense hardcover books.
I pull them all away and open the door. There’s Rose, crying. Millie runs to her and squeezes her arms around her, rubs her hands up and down Rose’s arms.
“Mum! Why didn’t you come and answer me? I was calling you and calling you? Mum, give me my necklace! Why are you holding it?” She grabs it from Millie, who is looking over Rose’s shoulder trying to silence her sobs because she doesn’t want her daughter to see her crying.
“Daddy!” Rose breaks free and runs into my arms. Millie is facing away, toward the kitchen, trying to wipe her tears. Has her father called already? If so, what has he said? Is that why she locked Rose up, to protect her?
Rose settles quickly with crayons and a coloring book in the kitchen. “I have no idea what I did,” Millie whispers to me when I come to her in the living room.
20
MILLIE
It’s been two glorious Indian summer days since Rose’s “disappearance.” We have five days until Kennedy’s test results are back. I try to continue on with the laundry, the dinner, with Rose’s somewhat art nouveau attempt at paper lunch sack puppets. But nothing is right.
I spilt grape juice on the one puppet she didn’t dismember—the merman—and spent the night dabbing the stain, blow-drying tissue paper ovals, and when that failed, re-creating Rose’s efforts with just the right amount of felt-tip marker pressure and shaky safety scissor cuts, while in my mind. This puppet, at least, I can fix.
In our new arrangement, neither Kennedy nor I say a word about anything important. I can feel the miles stretching between us. Did he know that Rose had crossed over into the book world and that’s the only explanation for why she was so inexplicably barricaded? Or did he think I did it? That I locked our own daughter in her room? And if he does know about Rose and my special abilities, what else does he know? All his disdainful comments about Mother, all his sarcasm and appealing whitewashing. I’d welcomed it without thinking. It had been so easy. Too easy.
Amongst all the strange inconsistencies, there’s one thing I know for sure, now that I’ve experienced Rose’s disappearance into a book, I will do everything I can to stop my daughter crossing over. What if, like Mother, she never comes back? What if she needs me and can’t get me? What might we lose along the way? Dr. P. All roads point to him.
I wish we could have put it off longer, but she’s a natural Reader, it’s clear and she took to it with very little instruction. We all read differently.
“Reality is fluid,” I’m telling her when Kennedy enters the kitchen. “Stories are fluid, dependent entirely upon our engagement with them, which is dependent on our histories, our openness, our imaginations, our environment, in short, everything we’ve ever done, everyone we’ve ever been, and everything in the moment of reading.”
He clears his throat, like I’ve said something wrong. “Why don’t you go play outside?” he says. She pushes her chair back with a screech on the tile.
“No, I’d rather read.” Neither of us says, but I know an understanding has passed between us.
Her footsteps lead up the stairs, around her bed, and then the springs groan.
Kennedy starts talking about dinner.
Later, I wait until Kennedy drifts off to sleep in his characteristic jerks and surprised breaths, then wait another twenty minutes until he seems deep enough into whatever he’s dreaming about not to be startled by the unavoidable creaks in the plank floor, and only then do I go out to the garden, to grab a spade from the shed.
To think I was so worried about disturbing Mother’s overgrown garden. Today it’s insignificant. Today it might just magic into place, or magic into something completely different—a gazebo, or a jungle gym. I don’t know what to expect.
I have to clear about ten years of cobwebs off the spade, which I do after slipping on Mother’s garden gloves—the red polka dotted ones—only to have a mouse scurry out from the corner where the gloves have been sitting, waiting hand over hand all this time. I watched it race to a far corner draped with a dirty blue tarp. It seems there’s an entire civilization in my yard that I have no part in.
Following the mouse, I pull back the tarp and there is secreted a pile of books. Had Mother put them there after the night she’d found me with her copy of Truth and Art? How strange to find this on a day when Rose herself has discovered the truth about art in the same way Mother had.
I recall with Mother, the way she inexplicably appeared locked in a room, banging and yelling to get out—the same way Rose had today. When I pulled aside the furnishings that had barricaded her in, I could tell from the way her hair was mussed, and her heavy breathing that she had just come tumbling, literally tumbling from the open book, the page she’d been on marked with a paper scrap. I read those words she’d underlined: something not art, not life, but a new entity: a combination of the two.
“Why won’t you tell me how you do it?” I yelled. I recall shaking her by the shoulders, the bruisin
g.
She didn’t answer. It was during her silent time.
“I know why you don’t want to talk,” I said. I’d become bold in the silence she’d opened up, having fallen into the habit of expressing my inner dialogue as if alone. “You don’t want to tell me how to do it. You want to save it for yourself.” I stopped myself before I could say because you don’t care about me. But I believe we both knew that by then.
She grabbed the book from my hands, the scrap I’d torn secreted in my fist, and threw it at me, a page slicing the flesh of my inner arm, drawing blood. It was a diversion. She ran out of the house, like she was afraid. Imagine her being afraid of me! But revisiting that experience with Dr. Samuels, I was taught that memory had been enhanced by my imagination. I worked his version of gestalt techniques. I trusted my gut. After a while, I barely thought about it.
Here, in the shed, atop of this pile of books is that copy of Truth and Art. I try to leaf through then realize I still have the gloves on. Before I realize what I’ve done, I have the dirty fingertips in my mouth, biting the thing off.
One thing at a time, I think, spitting, wiping at my mouth with my arm. I flick through to find the page really is ripped out. What do you make of that, Dr. Samuels?
Beneath it, the books are old and all different sizes; the smell musty and some of them have mold-mottled pages. I pick up the topmost volume, a hardback in orange fabric. Baudelaire Theory. I replace the book for later, saying the word out loud. Later. Then I quickly spin around. For what?