Her father was sick. That was all that mattered. Before she left for the Academy, she would make sure that whatever it was that claimed her mother would not claim him too.
Glenn lifted her tablet and placed a call. Kevin looked stunned when he answered, but Glenn jumped in before he could say a word.
“I need to see your father,” she said.
Dr. Kapoor’s office was dim and quiet. The furniture looked antique, all of it polished to a dark sheen. Bookshelves filled with actual paper volumes surrounded them. Glenn sat, as she always did, deep in an overstuffed chair while Dr. Kapoor sat on the other side of a vast mahogany desk. He was nearly the opposite of Kevin, short and round with a wide face and soft brown eyes.
“He said he had made some sort of breakthrough?” Dr. Kapoor said in his well-modulated whisper after Glenn told him her story.
“Yes,” Glenn answered, twisting in her chair. “On his project.”
“That he’s been working on ever since your mother left.”
Glenn met his gentle but probing eyes, then looked down at the arm of the chair and picked at the brass rivets that held it together.
Dr. Kapoor shuffled the papers in front of him. “And he says this project will allow him to pass into this other world while bringing a piece of our reality with him. And in this way he’ll be able to rescue your mother from the other side of the border, where she’s trapped, presumably against her will.”
Something caught in Glenn’s throat, but she pushed it aside and nodded.
“Did you see any evidence that this was true?”
Glenn knew he was testing her. Seeing if she had been sucked in by her father’s delusion.
“No,” Glenn said. “Of course not.”
Dr. Kapoor leaned back from his desk and studied her, holding a silvery pen like a bridge between his two hands. “And how are you feeling, Glenn?”
In her mind, she saw a bird slowly turn its head until its black eyes rested on her. The shadow that moved through the trees was so close she could reach out and touch it.
“Glenn?”
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she said. “My dad needs help.
I want to know what you can do for him.”
Dr. Kapoor stared at her from across the desk, then dropped his pen on the table and sighed. “I’ll make a few calls,” he said. “But, Glenn — ”
Glenn didn’t wait for him to finish. She pulled herself out of her chair and made for the door. Unfortunately, Kevin was just outside. He popped up off the couch the second she opened the door.
“Glenn. Wait.”
“I’m going home, Kevin.”
Kevin shuffled along, trying to keep up. “Just a second.
Seriously.”
“I’ve got to go!”
Glenn threw the front door open. Her breath was coming fast and she could feel tears mounting. She didn’t want anyone, least of all Kevin, seeing her like that. She crossed their wide yard toward the train, and the next thing she knew, she was back in her bedroom.
It was dusk. Hopkins sat at the foot of her bed, staring at the closed door. Her little general. She hadn’t seen Dad when she’d gotten home, having slipped back into the house as carefully and quietly as she had done when leaving that morning on the way to school. Glenn guessed he was either in the workshop or his computer lab, though there were none of the usual sounds to confirm it. Part of Glenn ached to go out and see him. It’s what she always did when something was upsetting her, but she knew she couldn’t. Not this time. What would she say? What could she say?
Glenn dropped into bed and wrapped the blanket around her.
Hopkins abandoned his post and curled up next to her. Glenn ran her hand along his side until he turned over and she scratched at the white patch on his throat.
Glenn’s tablet pulsed blue. She scrambled for it in case it was Dr.
Kapoor but found Kevin’s smiling picture hovering in the corner of the screen instead. Glenn touched the image and declined the call, then lay back on the bed. She strained to hear a whisper of Dad working out in the shop, but it was as silent as could be. Did he know that she had gone to Dr. Kapoor? Surely it was impossible, but she couldn’t shake the belief that he knew his own daughter had just betrayed him.
Glenn tried to bury herself in homework, tried to sleep, but it was no use. Even her stars brought her no comfort. Hopkins sniffed around her, curious. Glenn rubbed him under his chin.
“We’ll get this fixed,” Glenn said, pressing her forehead against his. “And then we’ll go. Just you and me. We’ll go and we’ll never come back.”
Hopkins slipped his forehead out from under hers and looked deeply into her eyes. Glenn stroked his forehead, then ran her thumb along the side of his face, down the length of his muzzle and over the prominent cheekbones that gave him a wise, ancient look. He eventually lay down beside her and slept, but Glenn couldn’t.
The vestiges of that half-forgotten dream had been hammering at her ever since she left Dr. Kapoor’s office. And now, as she lay exhausted and sleepless in the dark, the voices were sharper than ever, taunting her, insisting that if she would drop her years of resistance, if she would only remember, they would snap together and tell her …
what?
Finally the pressure was too much and she was too tired to fight any longer. Glenn could almost hear the crack as some wall within her fractured and that old dream emerged, fully formed, from the shadows.
“Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan.”
Those words still rang in six-year-old Glenn’s mind when she woke up hours after her mother had left. It was late. The house was silent. Hopkins was gone.
Glenn slid out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers, and pulled a robe over her pink and white pajamas. Still heavy with sleep, she shuffled out of her room into the dark hallway. She stopped when she hit the top of the stairs. Below her, the front door was hanging open, spilling the warmth and light of the house onto the leaf-covered yard.
“Hopkins?”
Glenn descended the stairs and stood in the open doorway. The yard spread out before her, plains of black and silvery blue in the moonlight. At the far end, near the edge of the forest, a woman in a long white nightgown stood with her back to Glenn.
“Mom?”
The woman took a step forward and disappeared into the trees.
Glenn knew she should go get her father, but if she did her mother might be long gone by the time they got back. What if she got lost and they couldn’t find her? Glenn set off across the yard and into the forest.
Her mother moved like a ghost through the trees, a flash of white that appeared and disappeared. Glenn struggled to keep up. She called out to her again and again but her mother didn’t stop, didn’t look back.
Finally, Glenn saw the bloody glow of the red border lights. Glenn paused at the concrete towers that supported the lights. She had never set foot on the other side of the border. She knew it was forbidden, but what if her mother was in trouble? Glenn crossed over, finally coming to a choked section of the woods where trees and hedgerows covered in thorns surrounded her.
6
Her mother was a few feet away, the back of her white gown slicked with the border lights’ red glow.
“Mom?”
That’s when Glenn heard the voices. At first she thought it was the wind, but as she drew closer it sounded more like whispers. They grew louder until it was a steady stream without pause or inflection.
There was something else out there too, something huge and dark, looming in the trees in front of her mother.
“Mommy?” Glenn asked. “What are you doing?”
The whispering stopped.
Her mother slowly turned. Her pale skin glowed. Her eyes had turned a rimless black and were enormous, unnatural, and as thoughtless and feral as some monstrous bird. There wasn’t the slightest hint of recognition in them.