Across the Spectrum (59 page)

Her eyes watered, and she muttered to Lauren, “What did you
do that for?”

“The play was last month, remember?” Lauren said in a sugary
voice, rolling her eyes toward me. “Mom helped paint scenery!”

I fussed with my briefcase, giving them sneakier looks than
they were giving me, as I watched them trying to communicate by quick whispers
and pointing fingers. Rick came in then, looked at us all, and went out
again—and I could hear him turning a laugh into a cough.

∞

“You all reminded me of a bunch of spies in a really bad
movie,” Rick said later, when I was driving us to our respective workplaces. He
grinned. “All squinting at each other like—”

“Rick.” I tried not to be mad. “It is
our kids
we’re
spying on. Lying to. I feel terrible!”

He said, “I don’t. At least they’re home—”

“They’re not at home. They’re at school.”

“They’re safe. The wand’s in the trunk of the car, by the
way. As soon as I can, I’m going to take the damn thing out and burn it, and
make sure the kids
stay
safe.”

I sighed as I drove past palm trees and billboards—the
once-reassuring visual boundaries of mundane reality. Mundane made sense. It
was safe, because there were no reminders in that everyday blandness that the
rules we make to govern our lives are not absolute, and that safety is an
illusion.

I dropped Rick off at his printshop. Sighed again when I
parked the car.

And I sighed a third time when I sat down at my computer,
punched up my program, and stared at the equations for the freeway bridge I was
supposed to be designing.

∞

When we got home, the first sign that Something Was Up was
the house—spic and span. Usually housecleaning is something that gets done when
Rick and I feel guilty, or when it’s gotten so cluttered and dusty I turn into
the Wicked Bitch of the West and dragoon everyone into jobs.

I knew, of course, that they’d given the place a thorough
search—but at least they hadn’t made a mess. I considered this a Responsible
Act, and brought it up to Rick later, when we got ready for bed. And didn’t a
Responsible Act deserve one in return?

“Very responsible,” he agreed. “Won’t it be a pleasant,
refreshing change to sleep the entire night, knowing they are safely in their
beds?”

“Did you destroy the wand?” I asked.

He studied the ceiling as though something of import had been
written there. “No. Not yet. But I will.”

∞

Home life was normal for about a week.

At least on the surface.

The kids tried another surreptitious search, more oblique
questions, and then finally they just gave up. I know the exact hour—the
minute—they gave up because they really gave up. Not just their secret world,
but everything. Oh, they ate and went to school and did their homework, but the
older ones worked with about as much interest and enthusiasm as a pair of
robots, and Alisha drifted about, small and silent as a little ghost.

I hated seeing sad eyes at dinner. We cooked their favorite
foods.

Rick made barbequed ribs and spaghetti on his nights, and I
fixed Mexican food and Thai chicken on my nights—loving gestures on our part
that failed to kindle the old joy. R.J. and Lauren said, “Please” and “Thank
you” in dismal voices, and picked at the food as though it were prune-and-pea
casserole.

Alisha didn’t talk, just looked.

I avoided her gaze.

∞

Eight days later I passed by Lauren’s room with a stack of
clean sheets and towels, and heard soft, muffled sobs. Her unhappiness smote my
guilty heart and I was soon in our room snuffling into my pillow, the clean
laundry lying on the carpet where I’d dropped it.

We’re the parents.
They are the kids.

That’s what Rick had said.

I got up, wiped my face on one of those clean towels, and
went back—not sure what I’d say or do—but I stopped when I heard all three kids
in Lauren’s room.

“I can’t help it.” Lauren’s voice was high and teary. “Queen
Liete was going to make me a maid of honor to Princess Elte—my very best
friend! Now we’ve missed the ceremony!”

“You can’t miss it, not if you’re the person being
ceremonied.” That was Alisha’s brisk, practical voice. Even though she’s the
youngest, she’s always been the practical one.

“Celebrated,” R.J. muttered. “How much time has passed
there? What if they think we don’t want to come back? That we don’t care any
more? Brother Owl was going to teach me shape-changing on my own, without his
help!”

Lauren sniffed, gulped, and cried, “I wish you hadn’t picked
up that stupid wand, Alisha. I wish we’d never gone. It’s so much worse, being
stuck here, and
remembering
.”

“I don’t think so.” That was R.J.’s sturdy voice. “Somebody
got the wand, but nothing can take away what I remember. Riding on the air
currents so high, just floating there . . .”

“Learning a spell,” Alisha put in. “And seeing it work.
Knowing that it had to be us, that we made all the difference.”

“You’re right,” Lauren said. The tears were gone. “Only for
me the best memory was sneaking into the Grundles’ dungeon. Yeah, I hated it at
the time—it was scarier than anything I’d ever done—but I knew I had to get
Prince Dar out, and, being a girl, and an outworlder, and a very fast runner, I
was the
only one
who could get by those magic wards. I liked that. Being
the only one who could do it.”

“Because of our talents,” Alisha murmured longingly.

“Because we saw the signs, and we believed what we saw,”
R.J. added, even more longingly.

Gloomy silence.

I tiptoed away to pick up the towels and sheets.

∞

Rick was in the garage, supposedly working on refinishing
one of the patio chairs, but I found him tossing the sander absently from hand
to hand while he stared at R.J.’s old bicycle.

“You haven’t burned the wand,” I guessed.

He gave his head a shake, avoiding my eyes. “I can’t.”

“I think we ought to give it back,” I said.

He looked up. His brown eyes were unhappy, reminding me
terribly of R.J.’s sad eyes over his untouched dinner.

“They’re our kids,” I said. “Not our possessions.” I told
him what I’d overheard.

“Talents,” he repeated when I was done.

I said, “What if Alisha had been born with some incredible
music talent? She’d be just as lost to us if she were at some studio practicing
her instrument eight hours a day, or being taken by her music coach to concerts
all over the country.”

“She’d be safe,” Rick said.

“Not if some drunk driver hits her bus—or a terrorist blows
up her concert hall. We taught them to be fair, and to be sensible. But to be
totally safe in this world we’d have to lock them in a room. The world isn’t
totally safe. I wish it were.”

Rick tossed the sander once more from hand to hand, then
threw it down onto the workbench. “They lied to us.”

“They didn’t lie. Not until the wand disappeared. And we
lied right back.”

“That’s love,” Rick said. “We did it out of love. Our duty
as parents is to keep them safe, and we can’t possibly protect them in some
world we’ve never even seen!”

“Think of Lauren, making friends. For five years we’ve
worried about her inability to make friends—she’s never fit in with the kids at
school.”

“She needs to learn to fit in,” Rick said. “In this world.
Where we live.”

I felt myself slipping over to his way of thinking, and
groped for words, for one last argument. “What if,” I said. “What if those
people from the other world find their way here, but they only have the one
chance—and they offer the kids only the one chance to go back? For ever? What
if we make them choose between us and that world? They’ve always come back,
Rick. It’s love, not duty, that brings them back, but they don’t even know it,
because they’ve never been forced to make that choice.”

Rick slammed out of the garage, leaving me staring at R.J.’s
little-boy bike.

∞

I was in bed alone for hours, not sleeping, when Rick
finally came in.

“I waited until Alisha conked off,” he said, and drew in a
shaky breath. “Damn! That kid racks up more under-the-covers reading time than
I did when I was a kid, and I thought I was the world’s champ.”

“You put the wand back?” I asked, sitting up.

“Right under the bed.”

I hugged my knees to my chest, feeling the emotional vertigo
I’d felt when Lauren was first born, and I stared down at this child who had
been inside me for so long. Now a separate being, whose memories would not be
my memories. Whose life would not be my life.

And Rick mused, “How much of my motivation was jealousy, and
not just concern for their safety? I get a different answer at midnight than I
do at noon.”

“You mean, why didn’t it ever happen to me?”

His smile was wry.

∞

They were gone the next night, of course.

It was raining hard outside, and I walked from room to
silent room, touching their empty beds, their neatly lined up books and toys
and personal treasures, the pictures on their walls. Lauren had made sketches
of a girl’s face—Princess Elte? In R.J.’s room, the sketches were all of great
birds, raptors with beaks and feathers of color combinations never seen in this
world. He’d stored in jewelry boxes the feathers and rocks he’d brought back
across that unimaginable divide.

Alisha’s tidy powder-blue room gave nothing away.

The next morning I was downstairs early, fixing pancakes, my
heart light because I’d passed by the three rooms and heard kid-breathing in each.

I almost dropped the spatula on the floor when I looked up
and there was Alisha in her nightgown.

She ran to me, gave me a hug round the waist. “Thanks, Mom,”
she said.

“Thanks?” My heart started thumping again. “For pancakes?”

“For putting it back,” she said. “I smelled your shampoo in
my room that day, when the wand disappeared. But I didn’t tell the others. I
didn’t want them to be mad.”

I suddenly found the floor under my bottom. “Your dad put it
back,” I said. “We were in it together. We didn’t mean to make you unhappy.”

“I know.” Alisha sat down neatly on the floor next to me,
cross-legged, and leaned against my arm, just as she had when she was a
toddler. “We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d say no. Not to be mean. But
out of grownup worry.”

“We just want to keep you safe,” I said.

She turned her face to look up at me, her eyes the color of
Rick’s eyes, their shape so like my mother’s. “And we wanted to keep you safe.”

“Ignorance is not real safety,” I pointed out. “It’s the
mere illusion of safety.”

Alisha gave me an unrepentant grin. “How many times have you
said about us,
they’re safer not knowing?”
she retorted, and then she
added,” That’s why we always go at midnight, and we’re only gone a couple of
hours. We can do that because the time there doesn’t work like here.”

“But another
world
. How can we set safety rules? We
don’t know what happens.” I held her tightly against me.

“You send us to school,” Alisha said, pulling away just a
little, so she could look at me again. “You don’t know what happens there. Not
really.”

I thought back to my own school days, and then thought of
recent media orgies, and felt my heart squeeze. “True. But we’re used to it.
And habit and custom are probably the strongest rules we know. Can we go with
you to the other world? Just to see it?” I asked.

Alisha shook her head. “There’s a big spell. Prevents
grownups, because of this big war in the past. Only kids can cross over—not
even teenagers. One day we’ll be too old. I know you’ll be real sorry!”

I tried to laugh. It wasn’t very successful, but we both
smiled anyway. “It’s not every set of parents who have kids who cross
worlds—you’ll have to give us time to get used to it.”

She hugged me again, and flitted away to get dressed.

∞

“R.J. has taken to telling me stories,” Rick said a few
days later. “Not—quite—admitting anything, just offering me these stories
instead of me reading to him.”

Only Lauren went about as it nothing were different,
everything were normal. Keeping the other world secret was important to her, so
we had to respect that, and give her the space to keep it.

∞

“Alisha told me more about magic,” I said that next week.

The kids were gone again. A spectacular thunderstorm raged
like battling dragons outside. We didn’t even try to sleep. We sat in the
kitchen across from each other, hands cradling mugs of hot chocolate. Rick had
put marshmallows in it, and whipped cream, and just enough cinnamon to give off
a delicious scent.

“Magic.” He shook his head.

“The amazing thing is, it sounds a lot like the basic
principles of engineering.”

“I think R.J. has learned how to turn himself into a bird,”
Rick said, stirring the marshmallows round and round with his finger. “They fly
in a flock, and watch for the Grundles, who I guess have a bad case of
What’s-yours-is-mine as far as other kingdoms are concerned.” His smile faded,
and he shook his head. “Nothing will be the same again, Mary—we can’t even
pretend to be a normal family.”

“Is anybody?” I asked. “I mean, really?”

What
is
normal?

We live in our houses and follow schedules and pick jobs
that are sensible and steady and keep the bills paid, but in my dreams I fly,
as I did when I was small.

“The universe is still out there just beyond the palm trees
and malls and freeways,” I said. “And the truth is we still don’t really know
the rules.”

What we do know is that we love our children, will always
love them, until the stars have burned away to ash, and though parents are not
issued experience along with our babies’ birth certificates, we learn a little
wisdom and a lot of compromise as the children grow.