He had asked for tea when he’d strolled inside, and as we were all too alarmed to react to what he was saying, he had, incredibly, started making it for himself. He filled the kettle, turned on the gas stove, and grabbed a mug from the cabinet, as if he had visited this house many times before.
“If it’s any reassurance, remember one thing,” he continued, his fingers nimbly straightening his dark blue silk tie. It caught the overhead light, and I saw it had a discernable pattern of stags identical to the stag presiding over the entrance to Darrow.
“Others have gone through the Neverworld before you. Many more will after. Hundreds of millions of others will expire never having had the opportunity that each of you has. So you must look at this as a gift. A chance to change history, for your choice of who will live will affect billions of moments barreling into the future for infinity. In other words, there is a precedent, and you aren’t alone. You must rely on each other. Each of you is a key, the others your locks. This isn’t a nightmare, and it isn’t a dream. It’s a crack you will continue to fall through until you vote. The sooner you accept where you are, the sooner you will all escape.”
The old man here, again, wearing the same dark suit, speaking in the same grand voice, was so incongruous and strange, none of us could really pay attention to anything he was saying. Whitley and Kip were standing by the kitchen island, staring openmouthed at him, as if he were a poltergeist. Martha was on the couch, stone-faced, her feet planted like she felt faint. I was doing my best to follow what he said, in case there was some clue that might reveal who he actually was. Yet all the while my mind was screaming, It’s a prank. It’s a prank. It had to be. Somebody—international terrorists, hackers from Anonymous or some other group—was playing a cruelly ingenious trick.
I noticed Cannon had disappeared upstairs. Now he reappeared, hauling his duffel.
“I’m out,” he announced.
“What?” asked Whitley, alarmed. “Where are you going?”
“Airport.”
“But it’s yesterday,” said Kip.
“No, it’s not. Of course it’s not. Yeah, we can’t explain it, but there is an explanation. I’m sure the physics department at Harvard is working on this as we speak.”
“I’m afraid the physics department at Harvard is ignorant of your plight,” interjected the Keeper, wringing out the tea bag on a spoon. “They’ve got their hands quite full trying to solve quantum gravity. Specifically, the vacuum catastrophe.”
Cannon surveyed him coldly. “I’m going home.”
“To do what?” asked Kip. “Complain? ‘Ma? Uh, today’s kinda yesterday’?”
Cannon shrugged. “I’ll be damned if I’m staying here with him.”
He left. We listened to the front door slam. Then, suddenly, Whitley was scrambling after him. And Kipling. Martha too. They were all moving, running away as if they’d just learned the old man was wearing explosives. They grabbed car keys, handbags, sweatshirts, phones. I didn’t want to be left alone with him, so I grabbed my bag and ran out into the downpour too. They were sprinting to their cars, engines roaring to life, windshield wipers flying. By the time I’d started the Dodge truck and reversed, all four cars were gone.
The Keeper had walked out onto the front steps. He took a sip of his tea.
The reality of the situation, that we were just leaving him there in the house, a complete stranger, was too wild to fathom.
“Don’t worry!” he shouted cheerfully at me over the rain. “I promise not to steal the silver.”
I floored the gas. As I roared down the driveway, I had the acute feeling of being chased. Yet, rounding another bend, I saw no one behind me. When I took a final glance back at Wincroft, the red brick mansion sinking behind the hill, even the Keeper appeared to be gone.
It began to get dark. The rain was relentless, the sky black and blue. As soon as I’d gone a few miles, peering in at every driver to make sure they were alive and not ghosts, aliens, or zombies (most doing double takes, wondering what my problem was), I began to relax. All the drivers looked human, alive, and ordinary, chewing gum, fiddling with the radio, utterly at ease with what day it was, what time it was.
Everything was normal.
I called my mom again.
“Bee?”
“Where are you?”
“In the movie. What’s going on? You scared us, the way you sounded before—”
I drove straight to the Dreamland in Westerly. My parents were waiting outside, ashen. I parked in the fire lane, leaving the engine running. I wrenched the door and ran, throwing my arms around them.
They were real. I wasn’t dreaming. It was going to be all right.
My mom was distraught. “You’re never speaking to any of those people again—”
“Victoria,” admonished my dad.
“What? Look at her. She’s completely undone. We’re not going through this again. No. Those kids are rotten. Spoiled. They’ll live their entire lives without ever turning around to see the mess they’ve made, Mommy and Daddy always running after them with a maid and a checkbook.”
“They’re just kids.”
“Just kids left our daughter barely able to eat or sleep for two months, if you remember.”
“That was shock. And grief.”
I was crying, but of course they couldn’t understand the real reason, that it was relief. The day that had already happened—whatever it was—hadn’t been real.
This was real.
I managed to calm my parents down, and we went to dinner at the Shakedown. We talked with Artie, who gave us free apple pie. We strolled along the boardwalk and talked about the umpteenth offer from developers who told my dad he had to sell the Captain’s Crow so they could build condos. Though my parents were alarmed, not just by my abrupt appearance, but by the uncharacteristic gusto with which I was approaching spending an evening with them—something I had done with relative apathy all summer—they said nothing. They pretended they believed my excuse for abruptly leaving Wincroft: “I had to get out of there. We’ve all outgrown each other, you know?”
They also humored my manic need to keep the night going, to walk a little farther down the boardwalk, to stare in at every sailboat painting in every window of every art gallery, to walk out to the old swings on the beach where someone had spray-painted on the wall LIFE IS BUT A DREAM, thereby postponing the inevitability of driving home and going to bed.
I was afraid to sleep, because the glaring fact that I had already lived this day nagged like a bad pop song that wouldn’t leave my head.
We got home just after midnight. Dad drove the Dodge RAM as I said I was too tired, though the real reason was I was scared to be alone in the car. We filed into the house, my dad yawning. My mom loaded the dishwasher.
“Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?” I asked her.
“Of course.” She smiled, though I could tell the question worried her. The last time I’d asked her to do that, it was just after Jim died.
She sat on my bed as we talked about changing the menu at the Crow, the community vote to tear down a drawbridge. I knew she wanted to ask me about them, my old friends, what had happened tonight, but thought better of it.
At one point she stood up to inspect the white daisy wallpaper of my room.
“I can’t believe it. Your dad said he fixed this.”
She scratched at a seam in the corner, tugging the edge. A large chunk immediately peeled from the wall.
“Are you kidding me? There’s actually mold here.”
“It’s a sign you and Dad should sell the Crow and retire to Florida.”
She crossed her arms. “Do I look like someone who wears a visor?”
I began to feel heavy sleep falling over me. She said something about my dad’s bad back, how it was hurting him more than he let on. I held her hand as I passed out.
My mom’s hand was real. What had come before was not. So a day had decided to repeat itself. Is it really that big a deal?
What lies the mind will tell to keep you safe.