The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past (9 page)

When Zach headed down past his house,
Cassie wasn’t within sight either. He started to get a queasy
feeling in the pit of his stomach. Could he have been wrong? Was
Cassie wandering about the neighborhood getting into trouble? Would
she walk beyond their neighborhood? The thought that his sister
could be hurt was worrisome. And if he was being completely honest,
so was the thought that Binny might have been right.

Zach pushed those thoughts out of his
mind and tried to focus. Cassie wasn’t an adventurous sort exactly.
Just more lost in her own world. Zach imagined she probably just
went a little further than she should. If he widened his search he
was sure he’d find her soon enough. Zach continued downhill,
picking up his pace hoping that moving faster might ease the knot
in his stomach.

§

While the little girl petted
Rembrandt, the man weighed his options. Since he’d already accepted
the events of the previous day, what remained was to decide what to
do next. But he needed more data. How did one get information from
a seven-year-old? Even more important, how did one get information
from a seven-year-old in a way that wouldn’t garner unwanted
attention from passersby?

“
Sometimes he likes to
hide from me so I have to search for him. I think he thinks it is
amusing.” The man offered as the little girl gently stroked
Rembrandt’s muzzle.

She seemed not particularly interested
in a discussion, but the man pushed forward anyway. “I bet you are
pretty good at hiding.”

Still not more than a muted “Uh huh”
from the girl. Apparently the man’s skills at small talk were
equally good with women of all ages, he thought to
himself.

The man took a risk: “You did a pretty
amazing job hiding from your big sister yesterday when she came
looking for her mirror.” Would the girl understand what he was
saying?

“
Yeah. She gets crazy when
I take her stuff.” The girl replied without missing a beat. If she
did understand, then she’d done an excellent job
deflecting.

After a pause, she looked up directly
at him, and with a sparkle in her eye she added “I’m good at
sneaking.” Had the little girl winked at him, too? There it was!
She as much as admitted that she had disappeared the previous day!
Not only that, she was proud of it. The man supposed that if he
could pull off a trick like that, he’d probably want to show off a
bit too.

§

Just as Zach was reassuring himself
that Binny was wrong, and Cassie was safe, the sidewalk curved
enough to open his line of sight and reveal Cassie talking to a man
he didn’t recognize. She was well beyond the two house limit. Zach
started running.

§

The man hadn’t expected to get a
confirmation so quickly. Or had he? What had she really said? Just
that she was good at “sneaking”. And she’d winked. Maybe? What did
that even mean – “sneaking”? Did he read too much into what the
girl had said? Ultimately, while the man believed in facts, and
science, he wasn’t immune to the value of a good gut feeling. And
the man’s gut was screaming that this girl could become invisible
at will.

“
You are not just good at
sneaking.” The man was now crouched down and looking eye to eye at
the girl, who was still petting Rembrandt. “You’re great at it. I
would love to know, what is your…”

§

“…
secret?” was the only
word Zach heard as he arrived, out-of-breath, on the scene, just as
the dog started barking. Zach was not a fan of dogs. Not in the
least. He didn’t mind the smaller ones so much, but these big ones
scared him. He’d been so focused on the man that he didn’t even see
the huge dog right next to his sister.

This was definitely the pair that
Binny had been worried about. Zach stopped in his tracks still a
few feet from his target.

§

Binny didn’t know how crying worked,
but if there was a tank somewhere in her body that stored tears, it
was now empty. Dry as a bone. She simply couldn’t cry anymore. Her
eyes were puffy, and her whole body slumped as she reversed her
course through the forest, trudging back towards home.

§

“
It’s time to come home,
Cassie.” Zach called to his sister. He tried to sound assertive and
at ease, but the nervousness in his voice was still slightly
evident. His trepidation was surprisingly coming less from the
large dog, than from the dog’s owner, who seemed just a little too
comfortable around Zach’s baby sister.

Cassie kept petting the dog. Had she
not heard him? Zach got an inkling of how his parents must feel
when Cassie ignored them. The moment stretched out for Zach as he
wondered how he would get his baby sister away from the man without
having to get any closer to either the man or the dog. Zach felt a
nervous anger rising in him — Binny was right to be concerned. The
man seemed to be waiting for Cassie to respond.

After an uncomfortably long pause, the
man finally broke the silence. “Cassie, you should listen to your
brother.” The dog seemed to take that as a cue and started heading
back down the hill, pulling the man behind him. As the man started
after his determined pet, he added, almost as an afterthought,
“Take good care of your sister, Zach.”

Whether it was the relief
of the man and the dog leaving, Zach didn’t know. But it took a
couple of seconds after they had left for Zach to realize that the
man knew his name. The man knew his
name
. What might normally have been
an offhand remark now felt like a warning.
How did the man know his name?

§

Binny had no interest in seeing
anyone, let alone the strange man who had been talking to her
sister. But there he was, coming down the hill towards her. Didn’t
he have anything better to do than patrol the neighborhood with
that big dog of his? Binny didn’t trust him. And she certainly
didn’t want him to see her like this.

Binny walked faster and kept her head
down. She couldn’t tell if the man was looking her way, because she
was doing her best to avoid eye contact as she walked past. Only
when she was clear of him did she realize she was almost on top of
her sister and her brother, standing right where the man had just
come from.

§

When Binny arrived, Zach was yelling
at Cassie for straying too far from the house. He was pretty
angry.

“
You were more than two
houses away from home.” Zach lectured his baby sister.

“
No I wasn’t.” Cassie
responded angrily.

“
One. Two. Three. Four.”
Zach counted the houses up the street. “Four is not two. It is
four. And the rule is two. Not four.” Zach was really upset
now.

“
Binny said I could break
all the rules.” Cassie was now pointing at her sister.

“
You said what?” her
brother turned to Binny accusingly. Binny’s eyes widened as she
sputtered in defense.

There was something different in her
brother’s voice. “I didn’t say that. And I told that girl next door
to keep an eye on her. It’s not my fault that she didn’t
listen.”

“
Yes you did!” screamed
Cassie. You said I could break all the rules and go wherever I
want. You said it! You said it!”

“
Are you insane??” Zach
glared at Binny.

“
I, I, I…” Binny
stuttered.

“
What is that smell?” Zach
started wondering. “Is that you? You smell awful.”

Cassie didn’t miss a beat and held her
nose with a loud “Pee-yoo”.

“
I sat in dog
poop.”

Zach started laughing, and it turned
out Binny’s tear tank wasn’t empty after all. At the sight of Binny
sobbing, Zach stifled further laughter and turned serious,
awkwardly trying to comfort her with a soft, “Sorry. Sorry. It’s
ok.”

Zach mercifully changed the subject by
turning his attention back to Cassie’s transgression. “She was
talking to that scary man and his scary dog again. You shouldn’t
have told her to break the rules.”

Binny now started
screaming through her tears. “Break the rules? Break the rules? You
were the one who told me that she was fine on her own. And knew how
to use her
brain
.
I told you about that man who was talking to her, but you didn’t
listen. Neither of you would LISTEN to me.” Binny’s anger was
rising even further and now it was Zach’s turn to be
defensive.

“
I’m not the one who told
her to go wherever she wanted. If something had happened, this
would have been YOUR fault!” Zach was yelling too now.

The yelling and pointing escalated
back and forth between Binny and Zach. It had started out heated
and now it was growing out of control. The kids were name-calling
and trading shouts back and forth. Each was blaming the other for
what might have happened to their sister. Cassie, standing between
them, tried to shield herself from their verbal blows.

First her hands went to her ears, and
then she lowered herself into a half crouch. And then, the thing
that the man had suspected, the thing the man hadn’t actually seen,
the very thing the man was deep down certain had happened – did
actually happen.

Bright silver tendrils of light snaked
their way around Cassie’s limbs, body, and head. They looked like
ivy made of white lightning. The ivy grew quickly to form a loose
web around the little girl. Suddenly, Cassie herself appeared to go
out of focus, like they were looking at her through a camera where
the lens had been zoomed in too far.

Zach and Binny’s argument halted
abruptly mid-sentence as they both stared at Cassie. The two
children froze – and then, before they could say or think anything
at all, their baby sister, curls and all, winked out of
existence.

7

Jay and Julie Jordan would have been
hard pressed to remember a time when anything could have gotten
both of their eldest children to instantaneously stop yelling at
each other in the middle of a heated argument. But neither parent
had ever tried turning invisible.

Time had not actually stopped, but it
might as well have for Zach and Binny. Their sister had been there
one moment, and was gone the next. What had just happened? What had
they just seen? WHERE WAS CASSIE?

It happened so quickly. Zach was just
about to launch into a bout of nervous upset laughter and Binny was
on the verge of a fresh round of tears, both thinking their sister
was gone forever. But at the last possible moment, before her
siblings could do anything, Cassie reappeared.

First there was a fuzzy, partly
transparent image of a little girl, then shiny white tendrils
reappearing, this time shrinking back into her, reversing their
previous paths. Then all of a sudden Cassie was there – peering
tenuously over the hands she had up to her face as if to gauge her
siblings’ reaction.

Their faces seemed to indicate sheer
terror. Her siblings’ expressions scared Cassie. Badly. She
crumpled, sobbing, curled in a ball on the sidewalk.

Binny was the first to reach out.
“Cassie, Cassie, it’s ok.” Binny crouched down and took her shaking
sister in her arms.

Zach followed quickly. “Don’t worry,
it’s all right.” he repeated, trying to soothe Cassie and probably
himself a little as well.

As Cassie started to catch her breath,
Zach, who was still crouching, looked at Cassie earnestly and asked
the question that was darting around in his mind, “Where did you
go?”

Cassie’s eyes got wide for a moment.
Then she broke into a toothy grin and laughed, still wiping the
tears from her cheeks. “Huh? Nowhere!” Cassie looked at Binny as if
to assert that their brother might be a little crazy.

Binny smiled at her sister sweetly but
with a note of concern. “You… you,” Binny didn’t quite know how to
phrase this next sentence, “You were gone for a few seconds. And
then you were back.”

Cassie’s smile started to fade a
little. “No. I was here the whole time since the man was here with
his dog until now. I didn’t go anywhere!” Cassie sounded less
scared and more annoyed.

Zach motioned to Binny to let him try
again. Binny was annoyed at Zach for waving her off but acquiesced.
“We were standing right here,” said Zach, “and all of a sudden we
couldn’t see you. And then after a little while, there was this
glow and ‘poof’,” Zach smiled as he said “poof” to try and help
Cassie relax, “we could see you again.” Did you realize we couldn’t
see you?”