Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  “The way it was when?” my dad asked, looking at Robbie. “Before she went missing? No, Robbie is back now. Let’s let it lie.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there, Dad. What’s been happening.”

  “Honey, I know you mean well,” Dad said, cutting me off. “But there was a reason your mother left. We didn’t want you to know, but I guess you did. We weren’t happy. Your mother—she was never the same after.”

  “But Dad, this isn’t just about Mom anymore.”

  I stopped myself before I could say anything else. Maybe it was for the best that Dad didn’t know what was happening outside, how the world was changing. There was nothing he could do about it from in here anyway.

  But gauging his reaction to seeing Robbie led me to realize something new about my father. I leaned in close so the guard couldn’t hear us. “You don’t seem too surprised that Robbie is alive,” I continued. “Did Mom tell you, Dad? About DW? Is that what you meant by ‘she was right’?”

  “No,” he insisted. “All I know . . .”

  He trailed off, seeming to weigh how much to reveal.

  “Dad?”

  “When Robbie . . . was hit . . . your mother said she should go get him. And I asked her what she was talking about. She wouldn’t tell me. But then later she said that if she ever disappeared, if anything happened to her, that I should know she was okay. That I shouldn’t try to find her.”

  “When did she say this?”

  “Years ago, right after the accident. I thought she was just rambling. A depressed woman, in shock.” Dad buried his head in his hands. As brilliant as he was, I knew none of this made any sense to him.

  So my mother had been planning this trip for a while, apparently. And she told my father that she’d be somewhere safe. That he shouldn’t go look for her.

  But where? Where would she go?

  And did her leaving cause the world beneath the lake to penetrate our own?

  “And you really didn’t know about the portals beneath the school?”

  Dad sighed heavily, looking quite tired and worn down. “No,” he whispered. “I mean, you live in this town long enough, you hear rumors. But no, I never believed them. I asked your mother once if they were true, since she’d gone to high school here. She just laughed. Said it was ‘kids playing games.’ I felt like a fool for even asking.”

  “Ten minutes,” the guard announced from the corner of the room. There was so much more to say, but there was no way to fit it in.

  “You’re going to get out of here soon, Dad,” I said.

  “Don’t get in trouble, please,” my father pleaded. “Just stay together, you two. You have each other again.”

  I looked at Robbie. “Yes, we do. But we’re not done, not until we’re all together.”

  Robbie dipped his head for a moment, and my father kissed it. “My boy,” Dad whispered. “My sweet boy.”

  Later that night, we didn’t even make it to the perimeter of Money Row or to the street that held the pyramid house before we realized that something was wrong. There was too much commotion, too many cars going back and forth, which would have been odd even if there hadn’t been a curfew in place keeping most people confined to their homes after dark.

  Music was playing from somewhere, upbeat old songs. The people zipping by our bikes in their sedans and SUVs were all dressed up, completely oblivious to us. But still, we pulled over so we wouldn’t be spotted.

  “What’s going on?” Robbie asked me. “Who are all these people?”

  “I have no idea,” I told him. “Last time I was here, the whole neighborhood was abandoned, and the pyramid house was empty. That’s why they had the meetings there.”

  “Who did?”

  I hesitated for a moment. “Kieren,” I told him, “and some of your old friends.”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore.”

  “Robbie, they were trying to figure out how to save you.”

  “Those guys couldn’t save a parking spot,” Robbie said flatly. “They’re idiots.” He turned to Piper, who had ridden our mother’s old bike. “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling and catching her breath a bit. “It’s great to ride a bike again, huh?”

  I was struck by Piper’s undying optimism. She may have been the happiest person I’d ever met. Normally I might have found it annoying, but Piper had a natural grace and honesty to her that made it all seem effortless, impossible to fault.

  “People change,” I said to Robbie, even though he was no longer listening to me. “You haven’t seen them since you were fourteen.”

  A pair of headlights whizzed by us and we all instinctively shielded our faces. The lights passed, and we decided it would be better to ditch the bikes by the side of the road and go the rest of the way on foot. Heading off the pavement, we made our way through a marsh, which was one of the few parts of town apparently unaffected by the changes DW had brought. Still cold, still wet, still abandoned.

  Approaching the house from the side, we gathered at its low garden wall and saw through the window that a party was happening in the living room. About fifty people were scattered around, wearing fashions that were at once familiar and oddly dated. They were sipping champagne and laughing so loudly I doubted they would notice us even if we screamed.

  I was staring at a woman in a large diamond necklace, sensing Piper shifting from foot to foot impatiently beside me, when another woman entered the room.

  I had seen our mother three times since her disappearance—the first time in the hotel, when she’d looked right through me, then in the woods late that night, and finally in the newspaper announcing her new government position. And yet every time I glimpsed her, my heart leaped at the shock.

  She was more beautiful than ever, her hair pulled back into a tight bun and her flawless face devoid of any wrinkles. Her dress was simple but very flattering. Long and black, cut perfectly to show off her tiny waist. She didn’t seem like herself, but instead like an actress who had been cast to play our mother in this strange movie. And she was surrounded by men in fancy suits, all jockeying for a chance to get closer to her.

  I turned to Robbie to see if he had noticed her, but I didn’t have to ask. His face said it all. He looked like a little boy again, watching her walk through the room. After a moment, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he turned his back to the window, slumping down along the wall and sliding to the ground so he could sit.

  I crouched down to check on him. “You okay?”

  “It’s just actually seeing her,” he muttered, and his eyes took on that distant look they had had on the train, when I was afraid he was losing his mind. “She’s right there.”

  “Baby?” Piper asked, coming down to sit with him. “Is that her?”

  Robbie nodded, and she put her arms around him.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Piper said, meaning it as a form of comfort. Like my mother’s beauty would be a consolation of some kind.

  I shimmied up the wall a bit to peek back in, and I realized that our mother—or rather, her DW doppelgänger—seemed to be the guest of honor at this party. She was holding court in the center of the room as people came up to greet her and shake her hand.

  “I think this is it,” I told them. “What we saw in the paper, she’s being presented with something.”

  “I don’t want to look,” Robbie said. “I don’t want to see her like that.”

  “We should go,” Piper said. “This isn’t what we thought it would be. We should go.”

  “I just don’t understand it,” I said, talking more to myself than anyone else.

  “What?” Robbie asked.

  “Sage said the planes were crossing because you were stuck in the train portal. That when I took you out, things would go back to normal. Why is it like this?”

  I didn’t
have much time to sit with that question before something quite chilling happened in the room. Robbie and Piper weren’t looking in the window anymore, and I was glad, because at that moment another person walked in, shaking hands and looking very much at home. And that person was Robbie.

  Of course, it wasn’t really Robbie. It was some sort of cruel twin, the one who belonged here with this version of our mother. Ana doesn’t have a daughter. She only has a son.

  I was confused for a moment. Kieren had told me once that when you cross into Down World, you take over the other version of yourself. That way, there are never two of the same person at the same time. But then I thought about it. We weren’t in Down World. Down World was in us. And my real brother, the one crouching by my feet, was the one who belonged here. So the young man standing next to my mother—he was Down World Robbie. And he wasn’t supposed to be here.

  I was relieved when a whistling came from the woods, giving me an excuse to turn my attention elsewhere. At first, I couldn’t see anyone out there, but when the whistling came again, I got excited, thinking it was probably Kieren.

  “He found us,” I said, grabbing Robbie’s hand and leading him into the marsh as quickly as possible, making sure he didn’t have a moment to look back in the window. We’d made it just beyond the glow of light from the house when a figure became clear in front of us.

  “Come on,” the voice said. “Hurry.”

  We followed the shadowy figure through a small patch of marsh and back to the main road, around a bend from the pyramid house. A car was idling there, and I recognized it as Scott’s. The boy who stood before us wasn’t Kieren; it was Scott himself.

  “Where’s Kieren?” I asked.

  “They’re waiting for you. It’s not safe here anymore. Get in.”

  Scott seemed to be making a concerted effort not to look at Robbie, but Robbie was looking right at him and seemed almost frozen as a result.

  “Scott,” Robbie whispered. It seeped out of his mouth, almost like a question. They hadn’t seen each other in so long, I wondered if Robbie wasn’t sure it was the same boy he had grown up with.

  “Hey,” Scott said, still not looking Robbie in the eyes. “You should get in the car.”

  “Scott, it’s me,” Robbie said, a desperation creeping into his tone. “Look at me.”

  But it was asking the impossible. Scott simply couldn’t do it. He kept nodding and motioning to the car, his eyes eager to land on anything but his old friend.

  I had begun to understand something since my mother went missing. When faced with the impossible, most people shut down. You may think you’ll be brave, or that you’ll scream or cry or fight. You may think you know yourself, know how you’ll react. But when the unthinkable happens, when your old friend who’s been dead for four years is suddenly staring you in the eyes, you don’t know what you’ll do. You don’t know who you’ll be.

  Scott couldn’t look at Robbie. And I didn’t blame him.

  We got in the car, and nobody said a word.

  The new meeting place was Kieren’s rec room. There were two reasons for this—one, of course, was that the pyramid house and all its neighbors had been taken over by the new elite. Somehow our town, I gathered, had once again become an important military base. And that meant that “important” people needed somewhere fancy to live again.

  The second reason, I discovered as soon as we arrived at the house and snuck around the back to enter through the sliding door, was that Kieren’s father had at some point been brought into the fold about the portals, and was now leading the meetings.

  When I saw him at first, I panicked. I had only met the man a handful of times, and that was many years ago. He had always been an intimidating figure, cold and very tall, with closely cropped hair that gave him the appearance of a drill sergeant. And I knew that in some ways that was how Kieren had always seen him—a man barking orders that he was inadequate to follow.

  Now he stood in front of us, almost blocking the door with his imposing shoulders, and I didn’t know what to say. Should I explain why we were here? Should I call him by his name, Mr. Protsky? It sounded weird in my head, because I had never used it before. As a child, I was always too scared to talk to him.

  And yet he didn’t seem surprised to see us. Of course, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Robbie. I had grown accustomed to having Robbie by my side again. Somehow, in some way, I guess I had never really accepted him as dead. And so it didn’t take long for my brain to adjust to him being alive again. It was like he was always with me, and now it was just literal.

  But of course, it wasn’t like that for everyone. And the reality of what must have happened in this house—the years of grief after the accident that must have rivaled only those in my own home, the self-blame, the heartbreak, and now the worry for Kieren, who according to Christy never left the house anymore—came into clear light the moment I glanced past Mr. Protsky and saw Kieren slumped on the couch.

  My family had destroyed this one, just as they had destroyed ours. That one moment in time, the accident, the thing we didn’t talk about anymore, had set us all off into some kind of hellish spiral. And even here in this plane, in whatever pocket of DW we had fallen into, we were still in it. We could never escape it.

  “Mr. Protsky . . . ,” I began, because no one was speaking.

  “Is it real?” he said, cutting me off. “Are you real?” He was talking to Robbie.

  Robbie had retreated somewhere deep inside himself, although he still had the presence of mind to hold Piper’s hand. He nodded, probably growing sick of being asked that question.

  Mr. Protsky did something then that I didn’t know he was capable of. He began to cry, but in that way that men do when they’ve been hardwired to know they can’t let anyone see it. His crying manifested itself in coughing and even gasping. It was terrifying to hear, and quickly devolved into a full-on coughing fit from somewhere deep inside his lungs.

  “Dad, let them in,” Kieren said. “They’re standing in the doorway. Someone will see them.”

  Mr. Protsky still couldn’t speak, but he stood back a bit and let Robbie, Scott, Piper, and me inside.

  The door closed and our eyes adjusted to the dim light. Kieren had stood up beside the couch. He looked pale and very tired. I had never seen him like that before, and it took me aback for a moment. I had been worried that he would do something horrible to himself. For years, he had been ready to sacrifice himself to save Robbie, and just when he was about to do it, I had ruined it. He’d probably assumed that I would be trapped in DW forever too.

  The relief on his face told me I was right about everything. He smiled when he saw me, and it was like a man trapped in a desert coming upon an oasis—not ready to believe that it was real.

  I forgot everything else for a moment and rushed to him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to push you. I just couldn’t let you do it.”

  “I was coming in after you,” Kieren said very softly, his mouth by my ear. I doubted anyone else could hear him. “But my dad found out and stopped me.”

  “Let’s all sit down, shall we?” Mr. Protsky said, having recovered from his coughing fit. Robbie finally turned away from Piper, with whom he had been whispering by the door, and he saw me with Kieren.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  Robbie was looking at us in disgust, and I instinctively stepped away from Kieren. I felt once again like a little girl, like I had tried to cross the street without waiting for Robbie and he was reprimanding me in front of everyone.

  “Hi, I’m Piper,” Piper said to Mr. Protsky, her voice taking on its naturally light and infectiously happy tone.

  Kieren looked confused, knowing who she was, of course, but having no idea how she’d got there. “Hi.”

  “Piper and Robbie . . . ,” I began, not knowing how to explain it. “They’r
e friends now.” It was an awkward way to sum up something so complicated, but it seemed to suffice for everyone in the room, who had better things to think about.

  “M, get over here,” Robbie said, not interested in any of these pleasantries. I did as I was told, walking over to stand near him and Piper.

  “Hello, brother,” Kieren said, a smile the size of Texas cracking over his dry lips. “I knew it,” he continued. “I knew I’d see you again. I knew we’d get you back.”

  “I’m not your brother,” Robbie said, his eyes boring into Kieren’s.

  Kieren didn’t seem surprised that Robbie was angry. It was like he had been expecting it. But there was something otherworldly happening in Kieren’s gaze, like he was a preacher addressing a flock of doubters, certain that with time he could convince them something divine was happening amongst them.

  “I understand,” Kieren said, his eyes not wavering. “But that doesn’t change anything.”

  “Let’s sit down,” Mr. Protsky said again. “We’ll make a plan.”

  “I have to use the bathroom,” Scott said, breaking up the quiet reverence in the room, and relaxing everyone a little.

  “I’m hungry,” I heard Piper whisper to Robbie, and Robbie immediately snapped to attention.

  “Do you have anything to eat?” Robbie asked, helping Piper sit down.

  “It’s okay.” Kieren addressed his dad. The spiritual awakening that had begun when he’d seen Robbie continued to flood his features. “They’re all tired. It’s late.”

  “Oh God, I’m sorry,” I said, having completely lost track of time. I turned to Mr. Protsky. “It must be one in the morning. We didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “We stay up late here.”

  “But I don’t want to wake Mrs. Protsky. We can come back in the morning.”

  “We’re divorced,” Mr. Protsky stated, still obviously harboring a grudge over the fact and not making any effort to hide it.

  I turned to Kieren, and I felt quite ashamed that I hadn’t known that. Kieren never talked about his home life. In fact, for quite a while all we had talked about was DW and getting Robbie back.