The mind does its best to lessen the impact of any catastrophe. It really tries its best. But then the distance between reality and woven fantasy becomes too great for even the mind to bear. All those words of calm and relief, the hope that everything will be all right in the end, can’t help stretching and tearing and fading to nothing.
Then you wake up screaming.
I woke up in the downpour in the backseat of the Jaguar, Martha and Kipling beside me again. When I sprinted away from them into the house, I was shaking so badly I had to sit on the couch, feet apart, hands on my knees, trying not to hyperventilate.
I was here again. I was back at Wincroft. At least I was alive.
But was this life?
Gandalf was running in circles around the living room, barking.
“No. No. No!” shouted Cannon.
He was at the kitchen island typing on his laptop again, though—undoubtedly after seeing that the date was the same—he slammed it closed and threw it across the room.
I realized dazedly, glancing up, that Whitley was outside, in the throes of one of her rages. Completely soaked, she was pulling the white umbrellas out of the patio tables and launching them over the railing.
Her temper had been legendary at Darrow.
“Psychotic fits,” the cattier girls used to hiss.
I’d always found it enviable—that Whitley could be so beautiful and smart, and on top of that so unconcerned about causing a scene or curbing her biblical emotions. It seemed unfairly glamorous, like she was the untamable heroine of a Victorian novel. (Even the oft-gossiped-about phrase around school—Lansing’s temper—sounded gorgeously bygone, like the name of an exotic illness with no cure.) To be so wild—it was how I longed to be. Wit surged into battle. I froze. Whitley threw her head back and screamed. I was mute. Her rages were Olympian, five-star, multiplatinum. They came from some boiling place inside her not even she could explain. Face flushed, eyes flashing, she’d demolish her dorm room, rip pages from every textbook, punch walls, overturn tables, tell off a teacher with zero care for tact, mercy, or an aftermath. It always seemed to me in those moments that Whitley was witnessing some alternative world invisible to the rest of us, something ugly and so vast it couldn’t be fit into the English language.
Her rages got her sent to the infirmary. They would have gotten her kicked out if it weren’t for her mom, the Linda, CEO of the pharmaceutical group Lansing Drugs, flying in from St. Louis in her fat mink to smooth everything over, which meant funding another wing for the library. It was the reason Whitley got special permission to leave school to go see a psychologist up in Newport. Whenever a fit happened, I’d always run to her side and hold on to her, like some astronaut trying to make sure my colleague didn’t float out into space.
Now, as I watched her seize a deck chair and throw it over the railing screaming, I could only observe her blankly, unable to move. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t help myself.
Kipling and Martha had wandered in and were looking around the kitchen like people visiting their property after a tornado.
“We have to call someone,” Kipling said, his voice shaking. “The FBI. The CIA?”
“And say what?” asked Martha, turning to him. “Time has become a broken record?”
“There’ve got to be others going through this. It’s a national emergency.”
“I’m sure Anderson Cooper’s all over it,” muttered Cannon. He was on the floor, hands linked around his neck like he was in a bomb shelter. “?‘Today. A new kind of breaking news. Yesterday is today. Again. More on this story as it never develops. Tweet us your experiences with hashtag Groundhog Day is real.’?”
Kipling grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels, every one yelping something normal. Coming up, we’ll show you how to make a three-minute omelet. Keeps whites white and colors brand-new.
The doorbell rang.
No one moved.
Within seconds the Keeper had strolled inside, a sympathetic, even grandfatherly look on his face. There was something insidious about him now: same suit, same tie. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“This will be the worst of it,” he said. “It’s the second wake that feels the most catastrophic.”
“Tell us what to do,” said Martha.
“I did. Take the vote.”
Take the vote. As if it were just a matter of making a left turn rather than a right.
Whitley must have spotted the old man from outside, because suddenly she heaved the sliding door open and stood in the doorway, panting and scowling at him, gusts of rain blasting around her like a storm scene in an old movie. Before anyone could stop her, she was sprinting inside. She grabbed a Chinese vase off a table and slung it at the old man’s head.
He crumpled to the floor. Cannon ran to Whitley, but she brutally elbowed him off, grabbing the Keeper by his necktie and forcing him into a chair. Then she was barreling into the kitchen, pulling open drawers, tossing pots, ladles, cooking spoons to the floor.
“The cycle of violence is actually a pointless denial of reality,” said the Keeper, holding his head.
Whitley was back in front of him with cooking twine, brutally tying up his wrists, brandishing a fourteen-inch carving knife inches from his jaw as she sliced the string. Crouching, teeth gritted, she moved to his ankles. The Keeper didn’t protest, only watching her, bemused, like a father when his four-year-old decides to bury him alive at the beach.
She dragged a stool over and sat in front of him, brushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Start talking.”
“About what?” asked the Keeper.
She smacked him hard across the cheek.
“Whitley,” reproached Cannon.
“Tell us who did this and how we get out of here.”
The Keeper closed his eyes. “I’ve already told you. The vote. As for who? There is an infinite number of possibilities. The universe, God, the Absolute, the Supreme Being, He Who Actually Is, Adonai, Ahura Mazda—”
She slapped him again.
“Wit,” whispered Kipling. “You think it’s wise to go all Tarantino on this poor man?”
“He’s not poor. He’s toying with us.”
She slapped him again. The Keeper remained unperturbed, blood trickling from his nose. I started to cry. And yet I made no attempt to stop her. None of us did. We stood there, frozen, all doubtlessly wondering—terrible as it was to admit—if hurting the Keeper might reveal something, something that would end this. He’d confess it was an elaborate game; the curtain would fall, scenery crashing. We’d laugh. How hilarious. You really had me going there. I also couldn’t help hoping that, as with so many nightmares I’d had as a child, if things became sufficiently strange, the dream would at last puncture and I’d wake up.
Whitley hit him again.
“The final three minutes of every wake you will each vote for the single person among you who will survive—”
“Why only one?” asked Martha sharply, stepping beside Whitley.
“I can’t explain the whys and hows of the Neverworld. They were determined by you.”
“But if time has stopped,” asked Cannon, “why can we return to our normal lives?”
“Only for eleven point two hours. Six hundred and seventy-two minutes. The length of your wake. For Cannon and Whitley it’s six hundred and seventy-five. At the end of that time, you will all wake up in the Neverworld again, as surely as Cinderella’s stagecoach turns back into a pumpkin. Even though your accident produced a snag in the space-time fabric, a crinkle in the cloth, the present world hasn’t disappeared. It remains alive all around you, a bullet left in the gun chamber.”
“What is the significance of our arrival time in the wake?” asked Martha.
“The beginning and end of a wake are based on an infinite number of factors, including violent impact, strength of connection, and random chance.”
Whitley, seemingly unable to hear another word, flung down the knife. She seized her phone off the kitchen island and had a curt, unintelligible conversation before hanging up, shoving her feet into her Converse sneakers.
“What are you doing now?” asked Cannon.
“Driving to T. F. Green.”
It was the airport for private jets outside Providence.
“I booked the jet to Hawaii. We’re leaving in an hour. Let’s go.”