Down the Rabbit Hole

by J. D. Robb

  “And you feel it, too. That’s why you’re afraid, isn’t it? Because it feels like you’re exposing your underbelly to me. Because you’re feeling weak and vulnerable.” He brought her hands up between them, kissed the back of one and then the other. “That’s not what I want you to feel. I want you to trust me. But I’ll take it—for now—because I know what it means.”

  “How can you be so certain?” It was very unfair. “How do you know I haven’t met someone else?”

  “Have you?”

  “That’s not the point. How do you know you can trust me? This could be revenge love . . . Maybe I’m using you to get back at your entire gender.”

  “Are you?”

  “No! That’s not it either. What I need to know is—”

  “What you need is a guarantee.” He tipped her a sly look. “They don’t even have those in your romance novels. Love is a leap of faith . . . and hope and determination . . . and you know that already. You’re just afraid and—while I am prepared and very willing to hammer at it until we’re old and gray—you’re the only one who can do anything about it.”

  He stepped back. Having presented his argument, he didn’t seem to have much more to say. He stood quietly, giving her time to speak, to reconsider, to look him in the eye and reiterate her case. When she didn’t, and when the silence between them grew awkward, he spoke again.

  “Look, I was sort of prepared for this—sometimes the gears in your head squeak really loud,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe you weren’t prepared for me to fight back—you underestimated that in me, too, I think. So just for the record, I do know you’re serious. I know you want out. But I also know that panic and fear can make us do stupid things. Disastrous things. So I’ll give you a little time, and some space, to reevaluate our situation.” He knuckled her chin up to look into her face. “I’m not going to beg you to admit that you love me. Not my style. But I will be around if you change your mind.”

  Her heart felt like an egg—cracked, everything inside spilling out. She watched him walk away, taking the stairs for expedience, not quite running. She wanted to scream.

  The scene blurred and slipped away.

  * * *

  The few weeks that followed were torture, and she was exhausted. Elise vacillated in the tiny breath between feeling stupid for putting her heart in peril again and being stupid by throwing away what could be the love of a lifetime.

  “Tough one,” Superman said, though there didn’t seem to be any pity in his voice.

  “No kidding. And I still don’t know what to do. I . . . I think I love him. I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’d never deliberately hurt me, but that one percent, I can’t get around it. People fall down all the time, you know? But after the first time they’re more careful and take extra precautions because they know how bad it’s going to hurt if it happens again.”

  “But don’t you think that standing in one place and going nowhere is extreme?”

  “I’m not standing in one place,” she said, miffed. “I just think I’ll have better balance if I walk alone.”

  “I might have to agree.” He had her attention now. He was tall enough to bend an arm across the top of the framed divider and lean on it. “Maybe Max is deluded. Maybe you don’t love him at all.”

  “Why? I do. Of course I do. Who wouldn’t? He’s . . . We fit, you know?” Every inch of her ached for him. She missed him. “He’s wonderful. And smart and funny. And real. Kind.” She let out a deep, wistful breath. “He’s the calm to my crazy. He listens to me—even when I’m not saying much of anything. And hot! He’s hot, don’t you think?” He raised his superbrows. “He is, trust me. I think he’s amazing. I just don’t know—”

  “And that’s why I’m wondering: Do you really love him?”

  “What?”

  “In this conversation alone there have been twice as many Is and mes than hes and hims. It’s all about you. It’s always all about you. What you want, how you feel. What about him?”

  He motioned with his head toward the Medieval tunics, hippie dashiki shirts and polka-dot poodle skirts as another episode commenced . . .

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Relax. She’s sweating. She’ll fold. Just a matter of time.” Her brother, Roger, looked as unconcerned as Max looked gloomy and miserable. “She’s scared, not stupid.” He hesitated. “She can be stupid . . . I just don’t think this is one of those times.”

  Slouching in a booth at some bar she didn’t recognize, Max’s sigh was deep and loud. “It’s been two weeks. And six days. That’s almost three weeks. I should at least call her; send a text . . . just hi. I need to do something. What if she’s forgotten about me?”

  The wrist under the fist supporting Roger’s cheek went limp in disbelief. “Do you need a slap or something? I’m telling you, she’s in bad shape.” His pause was dramatic. “Not as bad as you, clearly, but I have it from a reliable source that she’s been calling in sick to work and then spending the whole day in bed. My source caught her a couple of times with puffy red eyes and a stuffed-up nose, which—and you should take my word on this, too—once seen can never be unseen or mistaken for anything but crying.”

  “No. I don’t ever want to see her cry.” Max took a swig of his beer. “Happy crying would be okay. I could handle that. But I don’t ever want to see her as unhappy as she was the last time I saw her. I swear to God, it was all I could do to walk away from her. She looked so hurt and confused.”

  “I still say stubborn.” Roger finished off his beer and motioned to someone for two more. “I know how my wife and my sister work, but I have no idea what drives them to do what they do. If I say no to Molly all she hears is Oh sure, sweetie pie, do whatever you want. Elise is really good at overanalyzing everything. Her mantra is Yes, but. It can drive you completely insane, but eventually she gets to the point where everything yes is bigger or better than whatever comes after the but.” He took two beers off a waitress’s tray and handed one to his companion. “It just takes time. What?”

  Max caught himself staring, gape-mouthed. “I can’t believe I understood that.”

  “Well, that’s because you’ve spent more than ten minutes with her. In thirty years you’ll have an owner’s manual full of female gibberish. The thing you have to remember is that nothing you do is going to change anything. See, with Elise, you can give her all the answers, write them down for her and show her scientific evidence, and she still has to stubbornly go through her whole weird process until she comes to the conclusion you gave her in the first place.” He tipped his head and squinted at Max. “Come to think of it, you should probably run away while you still can.”

  Max chuckled. “Too late. I am hopelessly in love with your sister.”

  Roger shook his head in commiseration. “Why do we do this to ourselves?”

  “I don’t know. One minute I’m standing behind her at the grocery store. She’s reading the Cook’s Illustrated magazine while she waits for the people ahead of her to finish. Her feet hurt, I guess, because she steps out of one shoe and then the other and stands there in her bare feet, reading, waiting, curling her toes. I was mesmerized. And the minute there was movement in the line she was back in her shoes and returning the magazine . . . then she changed her mind and put it in her cart.” He sighed again and met Roger’s sympathetic gaze. “I wanted to follow her home like a puppy.”

  “Molly backed into my practically new, parked Cherokee Trailhawk with her Mazda piece-of-crap car and the whole time she was standing there trying to be apologetic and responsible she had tears in her eyes. She never cried and her voice never cracked. We did the insurance thing and the cops came; the tears stayed and they never spilled, not one. I thought she was trying to kill me. I did follow her home, but only because I didn’t know if she could see well enough not to hit someone else.” He grimaced. “We’re pathetic.”

  Max sm
iled. “Maybe. Probably. But I don’t feel that way when I’m with her. She does things that—”

  “Is this going to get weird? This is my sister we’re talking about. I don’t want to have to knock you out.”

  Max chuckled. “Pathetic, not insane.” Roger played relief. “I was going to say that she makes me feel like I belong. And awake. I feel so awake around her . . . and I didn’t feel asleep before.” Another forlorn sigh. “We fit, you know? Why can’t she feel it, too?”

  “She does.”

  “Really? She has an odd way of showing it.”

  “I told you. It’s a process. She’s yes, but–ing.” He bobbed his head. “It doesn’t usually take this long, I’ll admit that, but she’s not exactly buying a new car. The good news is that once she makes up her mind about something it becomes a forever thing . . . like a Twinkie.”

  Max laughed again—Roger had a way about him.

  “I hope so. It’s been six months and I can’t imagine my life without her anymore.” He pushed both hands through his thick black hair, front to back, then looked up suddenly with an epiphany. “Love sucks, man.”

  The both laughed then—agreeing, bonding, deciding to order burgers.

  Elise watched, transfixed, as a vanishing Max forced forward a jovial demeanor for Roger when clearly, behind it, he was anxious and unhappy. “He loves me.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I’m a dope.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “He never said it to me. Not like that.”

  “Then why didn’t you say it to him? Too afraid? Too proud?” She was both, and he knew it. “Did you know that historically it took forty years for Lois to discover that Clark Kent was Superman? Two people in a love triangle? All that time loving each other—him saving her life a dozen times a week, not knowing if she loved him or his superpowers and being super-insecure about it. And all it took in the end was trust and the truth. Think of all the time they wasted.”

  These words came in a different tone of voice and from far above her. Things had changed again. She looked at her hands and touched her face . . . then touched it again to be sure.

  “Oh.” A two-letter word filled with more relief than one would think possible. “I’m me again . . . I look like me again.” It then occurred to her: “I feel like a fool and I’m back to being me again?”

  “Apparently that shoe fits.”

  Elise sighed and started to turn to see who Martin planned to foil her with this time—she hesitated briefly, hoping it wasn’t God speaking from on high.

  She saw it peripherally first—smooth, striped cyan-colored skin, a long sweeping tail—and eventually came around fully to face the lower hem of a . . . loincloth. Automatically stepping back, twice, her gaze traveled steadily up the slender ten-foot body of Jake Sully’s avatar, Toruk Makto, resplendent in native cuffs, bands and ties; hair braided with beads, bones and bright feathers.

  God might have been a little less disquieting.

  “I know.” He stretched out his arms, and his lemurlike eyes of golden-green danced. “Is this cool or what? I tried it once before on a guy from Philadelphia, but he fainted.” Bobbing his head and admiring himself, he added, “He was pretty much hysterical the whole time anyway. I should have known better, I guess—but Avatar had just come out and everyone was talking about it and I was really eager to try it out. Still, you know what they say: There’s no point trying to dazzle someone who’s out of their mind with fear. Right?”

  “I can’t think of one, no.”

  “So now I keep this one for special people who’ve made the most of this experience and are on their way out.”

  “I’m on my way out?”

  “If you think you’ve made the most of this experience, you are.” The beautiful blue Na’vi came down on one knee and sat back on his calf, making him more accessible but no less mind-blowing. His wide, muscled shoulders rustled costumes and barely fit between the partitions. He curled his tail around himself, and then he grinned at her. “I told you I’d help you find your way back.”

  She stared at him. “So all this, just to tell me I’m an idiot? A suspicious, neurotic, hypercritical, misanthropic idiot who takes for granted all the wonderful people in her life who love her in spite of that. You couldn’t have just told me?”

  He shrugged. “Would you have believed me? They say it’s more about the message than the magic, but I think there’s more bang in the buck with the magic; it’s more fun, and the message is less likely to be forgotten too soon.”

  “Yeah, forgetting this isn’t likely.”

  He tipped his head to one side. “It happens. And don’t beat yourself up when it does. You’re going to keep screwing up and reverting back to those safe, dark, life-wasting caverns in your mind, because you’re just like everyone else, Elise. You’re human.”

  “Then what’s the point of all this?”

  “You tell me,” he said, distracted by the long black queue hanging over his shoulder. It looked like a long braid of hair with many little pink, hairy, wormlike neural tendrils on the end—an extension of the Na’vi nervous system. He gently poked at it, quivered and then tossed it away to hang down his back again. He looked at her. “If you were me, what would I tell you next?”

  Her stare was blank; she had no idea. So many things had come up and gone down in ways she’d never dreamed of—what could possibly be next?

  In mild desperation, she closed her eyes, hoping to become Waldo—he was perpetually lost, and that’s exactly how she felt.

  “He isn’t lost; he’s a traveler,” the lovely blue avatar said, getting in her head again. “Wherever Waldo happens to be, he chose to be there.”

  Dashed but still hoping, she sought out an omniscient character, all-knowing and wise. The Matrix Oracle maybe—she’d know plenty, and cookies would be involved.

  Abruptly, she opened her eyes. “I’m not changing.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “No, I’m still me.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “No, I mean, I’m not becoming something new.”

  “Why would you want to?” He grinned at her confusion. “You only get to choose what you feel, Elise. It’s the magic in this enchanted space that decides how best to show it to you—a picture worth a thousand words and all that.”

  “And now I feel like me?”

  “Now you’re feeling what there is no costume for; what lives naturally inside you, always.” He turned his long-fingered hand palm up. “Always.”

  “What is it?” she asked. His brow rose—it wasn’t his question to answer. “If I were you what would I tell me?” She spoke slowly, thinking. Rewinding, rolling forward and rewinding recent events. Her gaze came to rest on the large golden-green eyes that shown Martin, through and through, encouraging her. “I’d say: Go back to the last time I felt . . . not myself. What changed? How? Why? When did I feel completely myself again?”

  “And?”

  “And it was when Max said he loved me.”

  He shook his head, no. “No one, no matter how much they love you—or don’t love you—has the power to change you, Elise. That’s all you. You choose to be happy or bitter or cruel or kind. Max loving you is a damn nice thing, but it can’t make you feel whole.”

  “But my accepting that I love him can. Right? That’s it, isn’t it? It’s not about his love, it’s about mine. It isn’t him loving me. This is about me trusting him enough to let him. All this, and it isn’t about all the garbage that piles up in my life; it’s what I decide to do with it—the choices I make. Good or bad. I choose. Max, Jeremy, Liz Gurney, Cooper Winston . . . even the costume I want for Liz’s ridiculous party. I choose.”

  He smacked his lips. “I do enjoy the smart ones, I really do.” He stretched his arms out over the dividing walls. “And me? What am I here to tell
you now, in this disguise?”

  “How should I know?” But then—and with a distinct sadness in her heart—she said, “How to get out of here? How to find Molly?”

  “Before I do that.” His smile was gentle, but then he wagged his head and teased her. “Think of something insightful and profound; something more in keeping with my previous incarnations, which, let’s face it, had considerably more wisdom and dignity than all of yours put together.”

  “Yeah right, the Cat in the Hat.”

  “Curious George.” He looked at her pointedly—then used his finger to point to himself. “Abe Lincoln.” He aimed the finger at her. “Angry Bird, Grumpy and Charlie Brown.” There was a swagger on his face. “Hank Hill and Superman to your Daria. And now you as . . . well, you, and me as this magnificent and way too cool ten-foot blue avatar? Who’s winning this one?”

  “Tsk. You are so annoying.” He grinned. She considered him carefully. “So . . . Jake Sully. He’s all about leaving the past behind; about changing and reinventing himself and then deciding how he wants to live the rest of his life. You’re about choosing new adventures over wallowing in self-pity.” She laughed, uncomfortably. “Not too shabby for wise and dignified advice, my friend. The last of it, I’m guessing.”

  Before he could speak, the rumbling came again; a thundering like a stampede of Pandoran thanator plowing through the jungle. And then it went silent.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Okay. Enough now! Tell me what that is. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “You’re hungry.”

  “What?”

  “You’re hungry. It’s your stomach, it’s growling.”

  “Seriously?”

  “A lot of things can make your stomach growl, of course, but in this case it’s hunger. You skipped lunch to have an early supper with Molly after helping her decide on costumes.”