One night I happened to be cramming freshly washed towels into the hall linen closet when he came out of Donnie’s room. He didn’t see me, just leaned against the wall, shut his eyes, stood without moving for a long couple of minutes, then pulled himself up and turned my way. He stared, swallowed a couple of times, and walked away without saying a word. I finished the laundry and joined him in the family room off the hallway—Uncle Jim’s study back in my own world. It had an old carpet on the floor and furniture with heavy terry cloth slipcovers.
In the evenings Cam and I watched the TV news, switching from channel to channel to catch every shred of information. The National Guard was making sweeps through the Bay Area, checking IDs, demanding answers from those with no local address. They managed to arrest a few drug dealers and a serial rapist who’d been on the Wanted List for some months. They never caught up with the terrorists or with the Axeman, not that they were looking for Ash and Co., of course. I’d merely hoped that they might catch the gang by accident, as it were.
The sweeps, however, did prevent any new terrorist acts. The National Guard also arrested enough looters that the looting downtown stopped. Everyone hoped that the terrorists had moved on, but no one believed it. The Kingdom of Christ kept denying responsibility. No one believed them, either.
“Is there any chance,” I asked Cam, “that these terrorists aren’t government backed?”
“Sure. There are degrees of fanaticism, even there.”
“And so these guys might be the most extreme of the extremists?”
“Exactly. Now, officially, the Kingdom can’t afford an actual war with California, not with our alliance with Japan.” He paused for a wry smile. “They can’t afford one with anyone, for that matter. They don’t dare provoke military action. They have the smallest population of any of the nations in North America.” He thought for a moment. “They’re not as poor as the Confeds, of course. At least the Kingdom has grain to sell. They have government farms.” He made a sour face. “Slave labor.”
“No Oklahoma oil?”
“Oklahoma? That’s right, it was an independent state once. It’s part of Texas now. There was a referendum in Oklahoma about leaving the Kingdom and joining Texas. The vote theoretically went for Texas.” He shrugged. “I doubt if it was an honest election. That nearly did come to a war between Texas and the Kingdom. Back in 1961. The Kingdom had to give in without a fight.”
When the news ended, Cam got up, turned the TV off, and seemed to shrink or maybe age. Without history and politics to occupy his mind, he turned inward, curled around his grief the way a child might curl around a stomachache. He smiled vaguely in my direction and said the same thing he said every night, “Well, I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.” He left to go up to the room he had shared with his wife.
Through this daily schedule I missed Ari, constantly, bitterly, and with a growing sense of fear. What if he could never get back? Every one of Willa’s remarks and warnings insisted on returning to my mind no matter how hard I tried to squelch the memory. Thanks to the destruction inflicted upon Interchange, which should have been its anchor point, this world level moved, swinging in an irrational arc through the quantum foam—whatever that may have meant. I’d always left that kind of theory to others: Ari, Willa, and Spare14. Now, when I was desperate to understand, I had no one to explain it to me.
Nor could I, in turn, explain it to Cam, who had the kind of mind that would have understood, could I have given him a coherent description. I did try in dribs and drabs, as I remembered things I’d been told. He listened patiently, but his SPP made it clear that he dismissed everything I said. Finally, on the second Sunday I lived in his house, I broke down and wept as we sat on the couch with news droning on the TV. Cam laid a hesitant hand on my shoulder.
“Rose, Rose,” he said, “what’s so wrong?”
“I just can’t explain what I know to you,” I said. “God, I’m so frustrated! I try to explain, and I can see you don’t believe me.”
“It’s the concussion.” He made his voice gentle. “You’re not making sense, yeah, but it can take weeks for someone to get over a concussion. Things will be easier once you’re well. You can tell me then.”
Weeks. Would I still be in his house when weeks rolled by? No! I told myself. I will find some way out of this, no matter what it takes. First step: find the Interpol office in L.A. Maybe I could persuade them that I was the psychic whom Spare14 had mentioned in his report. If not, maybe I could find something else to persuade them. I knew about TWIXT. I realized that the knowledge, if I presented it in the right way, might be my ticket home. If I knew about them, they’d see that I had to be who I said I was.
If of course I could find their damned office. Once Cam went to work on Monday, I tried the obvious: Directory Assistance. They told me that there was no Interpol office in Los Angeles. The only listing they had was in New York, a bureau attached to the United Nations of North America. I remember Spare14’s various ruses to blend in with the populations of the world levels where he operated. The L.A. office must have had a ruse of its own. I decided I’d try trawling the Internet for clues—then remembered that there was no Internet.
I spent a couple of days in despair and depression. My head hurt, the cut on my forehead still bled occasionally, and thinking challenged me as soon as I grew the least bit tired. I sank so low that I wondered if Ari had deliberately left me behind. Maybe he was sick of me and my weird family. All my other boyfriends had left me as soon as they realized that marrying me meant the O’Gradys were part of deal. I did remind myself about the beautiful engagement ring I’d left behind in the wall safe, a token that no, Ari wouldn’t just desert me. I couldn’t make myself believe that I’d ever see the ring or Ari again.
Or my family, either. Another thorn buried itself in my mind: worrying about Maureen and her children. Chuck had obviously figured out that she was living with Kathleen and Jack. Maybe he’d tried shooting at her through the fence, for all I knew. For all I’d ever know, maybe, but that fear I shoved away. I thought about them so much, in fact, that they made me realize that Beth may have had a Douglas for a father, but she was, in truth, an O’Grady girl.
She’d been playing in her room with her fashion dolls, a pair called Linda and Ricky. Donnie and I were walking by to hunt for a toy he’d misplaced in his room when we heard her speaking. “And Aunt Rose is here, and then there’s Aunt Maureen. Two new aunts. And she’s got two children. A boy and a girl and Aunt Maureen.”
“Beth!” Donnie stopped and went to the doorway. “Don’t make up stories. You know you’re not supposed to make up those stories.”
I remembered the Pull, and Beth telling me that she’d called for her mother. Things fell into place in my bruised brain. Beth had talents.
“It’s not a story,” I said. “It’s true. Aunt Maureen and Caitlin and Brennan are real.”
Beth gave me a grin of sheer relief. Donnie looked up at me with narrow eyes.
“Really?” he said.
“Really,” I said. “Besides, why can’t Beth make up stories if she wants? They’re just stories. She’s just playing dolls.”
“Yeah!” Beth said. “So there!”
A thoughtful Donnie and I walked on down to his room. “Aunt Rose?” he said. “Mama didn’t like it when Beth made up stories like that.”
“Yeah, I just bet she didn’t. It must have been scary, wondering how Beth knew those things.”
“You mean the others were true, too?”
“I don’t know what the other stories were. But I bet Beth knows things sometimes just because she does.”
Donnie made no answer. We found his Pirate Mike action figure, and he went back downstairs without saying another word about Beth. As I walked past her room, I glanced in and saw who—or what—she’d been talking to. A little green Chaos critter was sitting on the carpet and watching her dress the dolls. When it saw me, it leaped up and disappeared. Beth just waved good-bye in its direction. I
supposed she was used to seeing her friend come and go at whim.
I suspected that the other Nola had also known things “just because.” Probably she’d learned to stop believing in them. She must have suppressed the raw beginnings of talents that she’d never been trained to use. Otherwise they would have driven her crazy, the whispers of things to come, the hints and suspicions about what other people might be thinking, the warning not to walk into a department store that was going to have a big sale on death that very afternoon. If she’d only listened—I shoved that thought away.
Wednesday evening on the news we learned of the first terrorist attack on Los Angeles. They’d blown up a neighborhood mosque and killed its imam as well some thirty elderly worshipers come for the third call to prayer of the day. How long, I wondered, would TWIXT keep the L.A. office open, now that the violence had swept south? If they closed it, it wouldn’t exist for me to find. I kept control of myself in front of Cam, but once I went to bed in the loathsomely cheerful yellow guest room, I cried myself to sleep, thinking of Ari.
I dreamed that I pulled a cord on a kelly green parachute, which opened and wafted me home. I woke up Thursday morning thinking, “To hell with TWIXT.” I’d find my own way back.
I have no world-walker talents, but thanks to my father and brother’s skill in that area, plus the family overlap, I do possess a weak ability to sense gates. In the past months, thanks to working with TWIXT and Spare14, the ability had grown stronger. On Thursday evening, when Beth had fallen asleep, and Cam was reading Donnie a story to help him do the same, my brain had healed enough for me to wonder about the three small storerooms at the north end of the house. In my world’s Houlihan house, they contained a gate. I wouldn’t be able to use it, but if one existed in this version of the house, I might find some way to send a message through.
I switched on the light in the stairwell, then opened the door to the bottom room. It was crammed floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes, all carefully labeled in the other Nola’s spiky handwriting—kids’ clothes, Cam’s old clothes and hers, extra dishes, Christmas wrap, out-of-style shoes, old books, and phonograph records. Her surrender to normal life had turned her into a hoarder. I shut the door fast and went upstairs.
The second room also held a goodly selection of boxes, but it offered enough space to walk in and turn around. On one box I noticed that she spelled her name in the Irish way, Nuala, which matched her sisters’ names, Caitlin and Eilas, even though Cam pronounced it the American way. Their family must have emigrated from Ireland more recently than mine. I stood in the pool of ugly overhead light and let my mind range out. Not a ripple of other times, not a scent of other spaces reached me. I turned out the light and went up to the top.
When I opened the door, I could see by the light from the stairwell that this room had a floor lamp. I turned that on, and by its soft glow walked into what must have been her refuge. She’d painted the walls a soothing green and carpeted the floor in beige. She’d furnished it with a gray armchair, a hassock, and a small shelf of books in one corner. In the other, a thick pile of yoga mats and a pair of floor pillows lay next to a blue box with a monitor and a slot for some kind of disk—the yoga lessons, I assumed. A venetian blind covered the single window.
In the Houlihan house on Terra Four, the venetian blind could at times reveal a view of Interchange, produced by resonance with the gate my father had created on the ground floor. In the Douglas house on Six, I stood in the middle of the room, faced the window, and let my mind go quiet. Faintly, like the scent of roses from a neighbor’s yard, I sensed a ripple in space-time. Had I been a world-walker, I could have found a gate in this room. I wasn’t, and I wept a bare scatter of tears.
I went over to the window and opened the blind. I saw nothing but a view of Cam’s backyard, shadowed in the night. The tears came again. I closed the blind and used the raw feeling of grief and despair to power my message. Sean. Sean, can you sense me? Sean, I’m here, oh God, Sean, please find me.
A footstep sounded behind me. I turned around and saw Cam, taking a cautious step into the room. He looked around him, all curiosity, as if he’d never seen the place before.
“You found her lair,” he said. “That’s what she called it. Her lair.”
I tried to smile and failed. He crossed over to me in a couple of long strides. “Rose?” he said. “I’m so sorry. I know you don’t want to be here, and at the same time, we’re so glad you are. It must grate.”
“Yeah, ’fraid so.” I found my voice at last.
He touched the tear streaks with his fingertips, a gentle stroke to brush them away. I looked into his eyes and remembered how I’d felt at seventeen, that I could happily drown in the blue of his eyes.
“Are the kids asleep?” I said.
“Yeah. Want to watch some TV?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll leave you alone if you’d like.”
“That’s okay. I don’t know what I’d like.”
“I’ll bet, yeah.”
Yet we both knew what we both wanted at that minute. I could tell by the way his smile softened, disappeared, the way his hand trembled as he touched my cheek again. He was grieving for his dead wife. I was grieving for my lost world, for my lost love. Ari, I’m sorry, I thought, but I’m so lonely without you.
Cam bent his head and kissed me. I surrendered to the comfort of his oddly familiar arms.
We ended up on the pair of yoga mats, right there on the floor. I had the dim thought that we were far enough away from the kids’ bedrooms to avoid waking them. This Cameron Douglas was the same sort of lover I remembered: gentle, considerate, eager to ensure that I felt as much pleasure as he did. He succeeded in doing just that, yet by two minutes afterward, when he cuddled me in his arms, even as he kissed my face so gently and sweetly, I was thinking about Ari.
And Sean. For the first time I felt a contact, a mere whisper, the barest touch but still a connection with my brother the finder. All that Qi, generated in the usual biological way, had gone pouring through the frequencies we call the worlds. Sean, I thought, help! Tell Ari where I am! Tell Dad! He’ll get me out of here! The contact faded before I could feel any response.
I needed more Qi, and I knew how to get it from the man in my arms. I kissed him; I licked his face like a little animal. He laughed and pretended to object, then smiled at me and rubbed his hand over my sweaty stomach, as if to remind himself that it was smooth and scarless. We shared a long kiss that oozed Qi. I absorbed every shred of it.
“Rose?” Cam’s voice turned soft and seductive. “Will you come sleep in my bed tonight? Please?”
I felt like scum. I was planning on using his need of me to fuel the rescue that would take me away from him. I stared at the ceiling and told him a truth, not a lie, as far as it went.
“Sleeping in that room?” I said. “I can’t do it. It’s hers and yours. It’s not mine. I’d see her ghost in the corners.”
“I can understand that.” Yet he sounded profoundly sad.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but sooner or later, I’m going to leave you. I can’t stay here and still be who I am.”
He raised himself on one elbow and looked at me. “Whatever that is,” he said. “Sometimes I still think you must be a ghost or some kind of supernatural being.”
“Then think about those old stories. Ask too many questions, and the brownies never come back, Melusina disappears, Psyche finds herself abandoned.”
“Sad but true.” He lay back down. “Can I ask for another kiss?”
“Yeah. That I can give you. For now.”
And I did, a lot of them, and more than kisses. I could tell by his gasp of surprise that he’d never expected to be aroused a second time. I gave him all the pleasure I could in payment for the flood of Qi, but the whole time we made love, I was funneling the Qi toward Sean on a tide of desperation. Afterward, I thought about Ari.
I slept in the guest room that night, and Cam in his usual bed. In the
morning, the neighbors down the street called to say they were taking their kids swimming. Did Beth and Donnie want to go, too? They did, but since swimming has its dangers, I called Cam at work to get his permission. Once he gave it, I packed up their swim things and a snack and saw them off.
In the suddenly silent house I went upstairs to the gate room, as I’d started thinking of the other Nola’s lair. Her taste in books ran mostly to historical fiction, a deviance from mine, which inclined more toward lurid adventures. I picked out a novel set in Elizabethan England and sat down in the recliner to read. Their version of that bit of history matched ours, as far as I could tell from that one book, logically since the fractalization had happened so much later. By then my concussion had healed. The words made sense, and they no longer danced on the page.
I’d just finished the prologue when I heard a car pull into the driveway—some kind of delivery van, I assumed. I got up and walked out onto the landing to listen. I heard the kitchen door open and the faint sound of Cam’s voice, calling, “Rose?” He’d come back home. Since the kids were gone, I could guess why.
“I’m up here,” I called out.
I met him at the top of the stairs with kisses, each one a lie. We spent a couple of hours up in the room that I knew was my one best hope of leaving him. I had the Qi I needed, and I used it all to blast—or so I hoped—a message through to my brother the finder.
Cam slept for most the afternoon, exhausted. I fell asleep on the couch. I’d drained both of us of every smidgen of Qi we could spare. He explained away his exhaustion by telling me that he hadn’t been sleeping well, not since the bombing. When the kids came home hungry, I ordered pizza instead of struggling to cook a meal.