Across the Spectrum (58 page)

The one he found her in caused him to stumble in horror.

The redoubtable Miss Briggs had climbed over a stile on the
far side of the field, in apparent pursuit of a puppy. While she was scolding
the terrified hound, a ton of beef on the hoof pawed the ground and swung its
massive head back and forth behind a bush, where she could not see it. Even the
puppy could sense the danger and cowered on its belly amid the grass.

Lucas would strangle the woman if he did not have failure of
the heart first.

He had no weapon other than himself. Trotting alongside the
fence, he sought to distract the bull from the woman in unfashionably shortened
riding skirts. He waved his arms to catch the animal’s attention, and when that
was not sufficient, he climbed the fence and sat atop the rail, roaring curses.

Astonished, Miss Harriet looked up at his odd behavior, then
turned to follow his gaze. Her eyes widened as she glanced behind her to the
bull pawing the ground.

Lucas nearly fell off the rail when she grabbed the pup, and
the bull snorted and lowered his head at her motion.

“Don’t move!” he shouted at her. “He’s just looking for an
excuse to attack.”

“I can’t very well stand here for the rest of my life,” she
retorted, holding the wriggling pup.

“It will be a very short life if you move.” Too furious and
terrified to be polite, Lucas leaped off the fence and began running around the
bull’s rump, away from Miss Briggs.

The bull swung its head in his direction, bellowed, and
charged.

Running for his life, and Harriet’s, Lucas raced across the
corner of the enclosed field, reaching the hedge on the other side with the
bull’s hot breath breathing down his neck. Grabbing a hawthorn branch that gave
beneath his weight, he vaulted across the wizened limbs—into a mud puddle on
the other side of the hedgerow.

“Major Sumner, Lucas!”

He heard Harriet’s panicked shouts as he tried to catch his
breath after having knocked it out. Mud puddles were softer than the ground,
but not by much.

Dainty ankles exposed, she climbed the stile, her expression
gratifyingly concerned. He wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled for
being so careless, but the frightened tears streaking her cheeks dampened his
temper. And in the end, she
had
listened
to his orders and stayed still.

Thankfully, she’d used her excellent head to go against his
less than clear orders and escape the field the minute it was safe to do so. Dazed,
he wondered if he could appoint her to be general of his household. But that
wasn’t what he wanted either.

Setting the pup on the ground, she raced to help Lucas up.
“I am so sorry, Lucas. You are so brave! I had no idea . . . ”

She was a mess in grubby wool and tousled curls. She was an
angel of concern with tears flowing down her cheeks as she offered her bare,
broken-nailed fingers to help him up.

He grabbed her hand. Admired her slender form in tawny
yellow. Wanted to drive his fingers through her wild curls.

And tugged the hand she offered, yanking her into the mud
wallow with him.

“You could have been killed!” he shouted. “Do you never look
where you are going? Does it never occur to you that
you
might be more important than a damned animal?”

She spluttered, shoved her hands against his chest, and
glared down at him. “What do you care? I’m just another nuisance who won’t fall
in line and behave as I ought!”

He rolled her into the grass beside the mud wallow and swung
over her, propping himself on his hands so he could trap her until she heard
him out. “I don’t need a field sergeant! Or a decorative piece of church
plaster. I need a
woman
, one who
understands Invisible Girls and is willing to put up with Impossible Men. I
need a soft woman who cuddles children and lets me pretend I’m useful. I need a
woman who looks beautiful with mud in her hair and straw on her hem. And you’re
the only damned one I know who fits the bill!”

She blinked, and her heavenly sky-blue eyes stared up at him
in wonder. “Me? I am not beautiful. Or decorative,” she reminded him.

“Decorative is useless. Decorative sits about collecting
dust. Beautiful is alive and glittering with sunshine and smelling of roses.
Don’t make me speak poetry because I don’t know any.”

“I think you just did,” Harriet murmured in awe, watching
the passionate play of expressions across Lucas’s strongly masculine face. She
had not thought him capable of feeling anything. She had been wrong. He looked
like a man in torment. In wonder, she daringly touched his jaw.

His head instantly descended to cover her lips with a kiss
that heated her blood in ways she’d never known possible.

When he finally came up for air, his eyes glittered with
triumph. “Marry me, Miss Briggs. Show me what I’ve missed all these years.”

Left breathless, she could scarcely gather her thoughts. “I
am outside more than I am in. I am not much at supervising the laundry and
housekeeping,” she warned, even though she wished to bite her tongue. “And if
you are in the habit of dripping mud, I suspect you have a great need for
both.”

“I suspect between the three of us, we can use an entire
village of servants,” he countered. “I can command the housemaids to clean and
you can command the stableboys to muck, if that is your preference.”

“I like animals and children,” she added, heart in her
throat, fearful she would drive off the one man she’d ever wanted. “I will look
after them before I look after the house.”

Undeterred, he planted kisses across her face. “If you will
think of me and Verity as your pets, I will come courting properly. I can buy
you sweets. I have a bouquet for you back at the house.”

She shook her head, put a finger to her lips, and glanced
sideways.

Lucas followed her gaze.

Clutching the ragged bouquet, Verity waited in the shrubbery
until they noticed her. Then, holding out the flowers, she said, “Will you
marry us, Miss Harriet? We love you.”

Weeping, Harriet flung herself into Lucas’s arms and let him
reassure her that finally,
finally
she
had found someone who loved and understood
her,
and not her dowry.

“We love you, Miss Harriet,” Lucas repeated softly, hugging
her as she had longed to be hugged. “Will you love us back?”

And she nodded fiercely, speechless for possibly the first
time in her life.

“Mom And Dad At The Home Front” was a Nebula Finalist in 2002.
It’s the first short story I wrote for myself since I was a kid, instead of for
an anthology. All my life I’d read and loved stories about kids who went to
magic worlds, but it wasn’t until I became a parent that I wondered how the
parents might feel.

∞ ∞ ∞

Before Rick spoke, I saw from his expression what was
coming.

I said the words first. “The kids are gone again.”

Rick dropped onto the other side of the couch, propping his
brow on his hand. I couldn’t see his eyes, nor could he see me.

It was just past midnight. All evening, after we’d made sure
our three kids were safely tucked into bed, we’d stayed in separate parts of
the house, busily working away at various projects, all of them excuses not to
go to bed ourselves—even though it was a work night.

Rick looked up, quick and hopeful. “Mary. Did one of the
kids say something to you?”

“No. I had a feeling; that was all. They were so sneaky
after dinner. Didn’t you see Lauren—” I was about to say
raiding the
flashlight and the Swiss Army Knife from the earthquake kit
but I changed,
with almost no pause, to “—sneaking around like . . . like
Inspector Gadget?”

He tried to smile. We’d made a deal, last time, to take it
easy, to try to keep our senses of humor, since we knew where the kids were.

Sort of knew where the kids were.

How many other parents were going through this nightmare?
There had to be others. We couldn’t be the only ones. I’d tried hunting for
some kind of support group on the Internet—
Seeking other parents whose kids
disappear to other worlds
—and not surprisingly the e-mail I got back ranged
from offers from psychologists for a free mental exam to “opportunities” to
MAKE $$$ IN FIVE DAYS.

So I’d gone digging again, this time at the library,
rereading all those childhood favorites: C. S. Lewis; L. Frank Baum; Joy Chant;
Ruth Nicholls; and then more recent favorites, like Diana Wynne Jones. All the
stories about kids who somehow slipped from this world into another,
adventuring widely and wildly, before coming safely home via that magic ring, or
gate, or spell, or pair of shoes. Were there hints that adults missed? Clues
that separated the real worlds from the made up ones?

“Evidence,” I’d said, trying to be logical and practical and
adult. “They’ve vanished like this three times that we know about. Doors and
windows locked. Morning back in their beds. Sunburned. After the last time,
just outside R.J.’s room you saw two feathers and a pebble like nothing on
earth. You came to get me, the kids woke up, the things were gone when we got
there. When asked, the response was, and I quote, ‘What feathers?’”

But Rick knew he had seen those feathers, and so we’d made
our private deal: wait, and take it easy.

Rick rubbed his hands up his face, then looked at me. And
broke the deal. “What if this time they don’t come back?”

We sat in silence. Then, because there was no answer, we
forced ourselves to get up, to do chores, to follow a normal routine in hopes
that if we were really, really good, and really, really normal, morning would
come the same as ever, with the children in their beds.

I finished the laundry. Rick vacuumed the living room and
took the trash cans out. I made three lunches and put them in the fridge.

I put fresh bath towels in the kids’ bathroom.

At one o’clock we went to bed, and turned out the light, but
neither of us slept; I lay for hours listening to the clock tick, and to Rick’s
unhappy breathing.

∞

Dawn. I made myself get up and take my shower and dress,
all the while listening, listening . . . and when I finally
nerved myself to check, I found a kid-sized lump in each of the three beds, a
dark curly head on each pillow. R.J.’s face was pink from the sun—from
what
sun?—and Lauren had a scrape on one arm. Alisha snored softly, her hands
clutching something beneath the bedclothes.

I tiptoed over and lifted the covers. Her fingers curled
loosely around a long wooden wand with golden carving on its side. If it wasn’t
a magic wand, I’d eat it for breakfast.

Alisha stirred. I laid her covers down and tiptoed out.

∞

“A magic
wand
?” Rick whispered fiercely. “Did you
take it?”

“Of course not!” I whispered back. “She’d have woken up,
and—”

“And what?” he prompted.

I sighed, too tired to think. “And would have been mad at
me.”

“Mad?” Rick repeated, his whisper rising almost to a squeak.
“Earth to Mary—we are the parents.
They
are the kids. We’re supposed to
keep them safe. How can we do it if they are
going off the planet every
night?
”

I slipped back into Alisha’s room. She had rolled over, and
the wand had fallen off the mattress onto her blue fuzzy rug.

I bent, my heart thumping so loud I was afraid she’d hear
it, closed my fingers round the wand, and tiptoed out.

∞

“Hmm.” Rick waved it back and forth. It whistled—just like
any stick you wave in the air—but no magic sparks came out, no lights, no
mysterious hums.

“This has got to be how they get away,” Rick murmured,
holding the wand up to his nose and sniffing. “Huh. Smells like coriander, if
anything.”

“Except how did they get away the first time?”

“Good question.”

I felt my shoulders hunch, a lifetime habit of bracing
against worry.

Rick grimaced. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m
thinking it too, but maybe it’s okay. Maybe the other world isn’t a twisted
disaster like ours.”

“But—why
our
kids?”

Rick shrugged, waving the wand in a circle. “Found by a kid
from another world? Some kid who knows magic, maybe?” His voice suspended, and
he gave me a sort of grinning wince. “Kid magician?” He laughed, the weak,
unfunny laugh that expresses pain more than joy. “Listen to me! Say those words
to any other adult, and he’ll dial 1-800-NUTHOUSE.”

I gripped my hands together, thinking of my kids, and
safety. I said, “Touch it on me.”

“What?” Rick stared.

“Go ahead. If it sends me where they go—”

Rick rubbed his eyes. “I’m still having trouble with the
concept. Right. Of course. But we’ll go together.” His clammy left hand closed
round my equally damp fingers, and with his right he tapped us both on our
heads.

Nothing happened.

Rick looked hopeful. “Maybe it’s broken.”

“I don’t think we’re that lucky,” I muttered, and went down
to fix breakfast.

The kids appeared half an hour later, more or less ready for
school.

The looks they exchanged with each other let me know at once
that they were worried—desperately—about something.

Then three pairs of brown eyes turned my way.

“Um, Mom?” R.J. said finally, as he casually buttered some
toast. “Did you, uh, do house cleaning this morning? You know, before we woke
up?”

“No,” I replied truthfully, watching his toast shred into
crumbs. He didn’t even notice.

“Did you, like, find any, um, art projects?” Lauren asked.

“Art projects?” I repeated.

R.J. frowned at his toast, then pushed it aside.

Alisha said, “Like a stick. For a play. A play at school.
Uhn!” This last was a gasp of pain—someone had obviously kicked her under the
table.