“What do we have here?” John asked.
“They were babes lost in a wood, apparently,” my mother replied. Then she turned to Brady. “You can use the phone on the coffee table.”
We looked at the neatly organized table before us and saw Sage’s old rotary phone, with an actual cord coming out of the back. Brady picked up the receiver. Even if I had wanted to try to call a real person down here, the only phone number I had memorized was my father’s. Who would Brady call?
John put his towel back in the bathroom and approached my mother, who was neatly slicing open the mail envelopes with an ornate bone-handled letter opener.
“They’re probably just hungry, you know,” he said privately to my mother, but loud enough that we could hear.
“This isn’t a soup kitchen.”
John gave her a look.
My mother temporarily let her hands, still holding envelopes and the small opener, fall to her sides in an exasperated motion.
“All right, dear,” he said. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.” He, too, gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.
Brady began to dial next to me, and my back tensed, waiting to see who would pick up, if anybody. After a moment, he put the receiver back down.
“Nobody home,” he said to my mother, who was reading her mail. “Thank you for your hospitality. We’ll be going.” And he stood up, his hand on my back to indicate that I should follow.
“I’ll have Alexei show you out,” my mother replied, not looking up.
“Oh, we know the way . . . ,” Brady started, but my mother had already pressed a button on some sort of old-fashioned intercom box sitting on her desk.
Alexei, the first man with the bicycle, must have been right outside the door, because he came in immediately. He cleared his throat, waiting for us.
Brady gently pressed on my back, clearly anxious to go. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my mother here. Even if she wasn’t real, even if she didn’t know me, I couldn’t help but think that I may never see her again.
Is this the way I would always remember her?
I stopped before we reached the door and turned to her. I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t even look up from her mail. She looked like a character from one of those black-and-white movies. Impossibly beautiful and impossibly cold.
“Mom?” I asked.
Brady froze by my side, and I could see his head turning from my mother’s face to my own, probably seeing the strong resemblance.
My mother, however, didn’t flinch. I needed her to look up. I needed her to recognize me. It wasn’t possible that any plane could exist in this universe in which a mother wouldn’t recognize her own daughter. Something would have to register with her.
She looked up at me finally, her mouth twisted into something I could only describe as disgust. She shook her head, as though I had screamed an obscenity in church.
“Don’t come back here,” was all she said. “The lake is for hotel guests only.”
And with that, she looked back down at her mail, and Alexei led us out of the room and through the lobby. My mind had gone completely numb. Where were we? Were we in the past? Was it really the 1950s here? I knew it was possible to go to other times in these portals, I just had never seen it.
But if this was the ’50s, why was a version of my mother living here? And a version of John? How did these people get transported to another time?
I was processing all these thoughts, with Brady walking next to me, when I heard him take in a deep breath, almost like a gasp. He kept time behind Alexei, trying not to give anything away, but his eyes were transfixed by what he saw before him.
I followed his sight line to a spot slightly above the main entrance to the hotel as we were about to walk out the front door. Nothing seemed odd at first. Just an American flag, and next to it, an enormous portrait of a man with a strange appearance. He was probably in his seventies, but his hair had been dyed jet black and his skin seemed to be painted tan, unsuccessful attempts to make him look much younger. Beneath his portrait, in gold letters, were the words: God Bless Our Leader.
Beneath that, the words were repeated in what looked like Russian.
Alexei walked us through the front gate of the hotel, for there was now a gate to walk through. Everything about the street had changed. This small town was now clearly a resort destination. All the mom-and-pop stores that had lined the walkway up and down from the hotel were gone, with towering elm trees and a few boutiques taking their place. The street looked newly paved and fancy old cars were zooming by, their radios blaring jazz and bebop.
We were standing on the sidewalk outside the gate, taking it all in.
“The hotel has a strict policy on trespassing,” Alexei said. “If we see you here again, we’ll have to call the authorities.”
Brady nodded, clearly waiting for him to leave.
“And tell your friends too,” Alexei added, before heading back inside.
“Yes, sir,” Brady responded, already turning me away from the hotel to lead me down the sidewalk. “Just walk.”
“Where are we, Brady?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, keeping his voice low and nodding to passersby, clearly trying to blend in. But we were still barefoot and wearing our modern clothes. Everyone stared at us, not looking confused so much as annoyed that we were on their street.
“But is it still modern times?”
“I said I don’t know,” Brady continued, walking faster and pushing me from behind.
A well-dressed couple passed us, and I could hear the woman whisper to the man, “Why doesn’t the city do something about them?”
“Just ignore them,” the man replied as they hurried past us. I spun my head to watch them go, and saw the woman looking over her shoulder at me, her brow furrowed in repulsion.
My mind raced, desperately trying to put together the pieces. We passed a newsstand.
“Wait a second,” I said. I could feel Brady’s frustration that I had stopped us, but I had to see the newspaper.
When I did, my heart sank. “Oh my God.”
We weren’t in the past, or the future either. We were right here, right now. The paper was called The Lakeside Charter, and it had today’s date on it.
“Don’t read it if you’re not going to buy it,” the man guarding the newsstand barked at me. I stepped away from the papers. Brady hadn’t said a word; he just stood next to me. “You kids need to get back to your part of town. You’ll get arrested here.”
“Sorry, sir,” Brady said, again being curt and polite. He clearly wanted to get us away from this place, and I couldn’t blame him. I let Brady take my hand, and we walked as quickly as we could down the street and away from the commercial area. Soon the fancy buildings and the palm trees gave way to some more-rundown old shops and small houses. The neatly mowed lawns slowly became overgrown with weeds and dried-out bushes. And all the fancy cars were nowhere to be seen. Other people who looked like us began to appear, wearing torn old T-shirts and jeans with no shoes. Nobody seemed to notice us anymore, or care that we were there.
“Over there,” Brady said, pointing to a small diner on the corner. “We can talk in there.”
We walked in and saw the place was nearly deserted. Only one booth was occupied, by an old lady who was clinging to a cup of coffee, her eyes lost in a maze of thoughts. As we headed to the back and found a booth, I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off her. Why did she look so hopelessly sad?
Brady led us into the farthest corner and pulled me deep into the middle of the booth before scanning the room. Immediately, a waitress appeared. She seemed to be about our age and, like us, was not wearing any shoes.
“Do you have any money?” she asked.
For a moment, I was completely confused. Was she a waitress or someone who had come in here to beg? But she
was holding menus in her hand.
“Of course,” Brady answered.
“I have to see it.” She looked over her shoulder quickly to see if she was being watched, and leaned in a bit closer. “I’m sorry, they make me ask.”
I froze for a moment, thinking of my suitcase still sitting in the hotel room. In it, the rest of my money was tucked into a hidden pocket sewn into the lining. The only thing close to money I had on me was the flattened penny Kieren had given me.
Brady made a slight show of checking his pockets, but I knew he must have realized what I was already thinking—it didn’t matter because the money here was certainly different. He took his hand out again, empty. “Sorry, you got us. We’ll go.”
“Wait,” she said, again looking over her shoulder. When she seemed confident that the coast was clear, she looked at me and then at him. “Are you a part of it?” she asked, her tone suddenly anxious.
“Part of it?” I asked.
She seemed to think for a second. Then she asked us a question in Russian.
We both shrugged.
The girl seemed to give up on us then, and stood back up, her voice returning to its droll monotone. “I can bring you coffee, but that’s it. Then you have to go.”
She walked away before we could respond.
Brady leaned in towards me, his face almost touching mine. “It’s not real. Look at me.”
I looked up at him, trying to find some comfort in his being near me. But I still found myself shaking.
“It’s not real. We’re going home.”
“It’s real to her,” I said, nodding to the waitress.
“That’s not our problem,” he quickly countered. “We’re sneaking back to the lake tonight and going home.”
“How, Brady? You heard what they said.”
“There’s got to be a way. We’ll find it.”
The waitress came back with the coffees and Brady sat back immediately, as though he had been caught passing notes in class.
“She looked right through me,” I said, picturing my mother’s cold eyes. “She didn’t even know me.”
“That woman is not your mother.”
I stared at my coffee, wanting desperately to go back home. What had I done? Why did I bring us here?
“Did you hear me?”
I could only nod. I looked out the window at the desolate street. A few more people shuffled past, all tired and barefoot. Whatever money was in this world, it was clearly all concentrated among those at the hotel.
I thought of the hotel, and John in his nice suit, and my mind raced back to what Sage had told me.
“John wanted this,” I said out loud.
“What?”
“Sage told me that John built this portal. He asked my mother to bring him some sort of key, and he used it to build a doorway to this place.”
Brady glanced around at the hellscape surrounding us. “Maybe he didn’t know it would be like this.”
“Or maybe he made it like this on purpose.”
But Brady just shook his head, not letting the words land. “How?”
I thought about it, trying to imagine the day John first came through his new portal into this flip side of his reality. What would be the first thing he’d do? “The Yesterday door.”
“You think he changed something in the past?” Brady asked, still incredulous.
“It’s the only way this world could be so different—it was set on a different path a long time ago.”
“Why, though? Why make it like this?”
“Look at it,” I insisted. “He’s got everything here. Money, a successful hotel . . .” I paused, imagining the monogrammed hand towel he’d used to dry his hands. “And my mother, of course. That’s really all he wanted.”
“The John we met wasn’t evil, Marina. He’s just a weirdo who likes to paint action figures.”
“You just described every serial killer,” I couldn’t help but observe, which made Brady chuckle into the back of his hand.
I took the thought one step further. A weirdo who likes action figures. Did he like other toys too? “Maybe it’s like a game to him. Like cosplay. When things get too boring up there”—I nodded towards the sky, but Brady knew what I meant—“he can dip down here for a bit, take over this dark, powerful version of himself. Pretend he’s a captain of industry or whatever the hell that dude was.”
Brady nodded slightly, but his eyes were fixed somewhere on the table. “It’s hard to believe he would make all these people live like this . . . just for a game.”
“You don’t know what’s in people’s hearts,” I said.
It’s not real. They do it with mirrors. My brother’s voice kept echoing in my mind. If the John in the hotel was the version of himself he always wanted to be, then was that cold woman with the red lips a reflection of my mother? Was this what she had been hiding in her heart the whole time?
“Don’t lose hope,” Brady said. “This place is a mistake. I’m going to get you back home.” He grabbed my hand then, and I could see something shifting inside of him. “Let’s go.”
He all but dragged me out of the booth. We stood up and were about to walk away when he took a dollar out of his pocket. “Here. I don’t know if this works here, but it’s something.” He threw it on the table and led me outside. The old lady in her booth didn’t notice us as we zipped past.
We were already down the street when the waitress popped out of the diner behind us.
“Wait!” she called.
We turned and saw her holding up the dollar bill. She seemed to examine us both then, taking in our clothes and looking into our eyes. She approached slowly, like a tiger sizing up its prey. “What’s the capital of France?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. What was she talking about? I looked to Brady, who also seemed to get a chuckle out of the question.
“Um, Paris?” he asked rhetorically.
She nodded and walked the rest of the way up to us, handing Brady back his dollar.
“There is no France,” she said. “You’re from the other side.”
I felt a ball drop into my stomach. We had been caught. I didn’t even want to think about what happened to people here who were caught doing something wrong. I tugged on Brady’s hand, ready to make a run for it.
“It’s okay. I’m part of it.” She quickly turned her wrist over, showing us three dime-length scars on the inside of her lower arm. It looked like she had cut herself on purpose, and I realized it must be some sort of code.
A couple walked by, and even though they looked somehow preoccupied, just like the woman in the booth, the waitress’s body stiffened and she looked to the ground, not speaking until they were past.
“We meet here at midnight. Hide that,” she said, referring to the dollar. “Don’t let them see it.”
Brady quickly stuffed the bill back into his pocket.
“You should go to the school until then. Walk to Mason Street and make a right. You’ll see it at the end.”
“Okay,” Brady said. “Won’t they notice two kids they’ve never seen before going to school?”
The waitress looked confused. “Well, it’s not a real school. Just do what everyone else is doing. No one will notice.”
A man walked into the diner then, and we all turned to hear the little door bells jingle.
“I have to go in. When you get here, you’ll need to know the code word.”
“Okay,” Brady said. “And what is that?”
She looked around again, making sure no one was listening.
“It’s Sage,” she said, before quickly retreating into the diner and closing the door behind her.
The school, if it could be called that, was easy enough to find. It was one of the only structures still standing at the end of the road, surrounded by rows of half-built hou
ses that sat like empty birdcages on either side. I couldn’t tell by looking at them if they had been abandoned halfway through their construction, or if they had once been whole and later dismantled brick by brick until nothing was left but their skeletons.
But the school, which was swarming with people, still stood. Outside, vendors shouted that they had various goods—apples, diapers, even shoes, and long lines of people stood in front of them, waiting for what seemed like a very long time. The line for shoes had dozens of people in it, even though the booth that advertised them on a large sign seemed to be unmanned, and no shoes appeared to fill the empty stacked boxes behind it. I supposed that the people must have been hoping that whoever worked there would be back with an extra supply.
On the other side of the makeshift marketplace was a small outdoor area with a red cross above it. This seemed to be the clinic, and an even longer line of people were waiting there. As we drew closer to the school, I could see that there appeared to be only one woman working in the clinic. She was wearing a traditional nurse’s outfit, complete with a triangular white hat. Nearby stood a small table with a handful of prefilled syringes lined up in a neat fashion and nothing else. As each person sat down, she tied a rubber band around their upper arm and gave them a shot.
I slowed down to watch for a moment before we went into the building, and realized that the woman didn’t seem to be talking to any of the patients, nor did she have any other medicine. People simply sat down and she wordlessly gave them their shot.
“How does she know what’s wrong with them?” I asked Brady, but he only shrugged.
“Don’t stare,” he whispered. “We can’t call attention to ourselves.”
I agreed, and we walked in side by side. I was relieved that we seemed to be dressed the same as everyone else.
A man in a uniform, with some sort of machine gun dangling over his shoulder, approached us. We both froze. He said something in Russian and I quickly glanced at Brady, who shook his head.
“Why are you late?” the man repeated, this time in English.
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