Neverworld Wake(25)
I visited the elderly. They were my favorite. Because they were locked inside their own Neverworlds too, impenetrable rooms of repetition and loneliness. I made a habit of ringing their doorbells with an excuse about selling early Christmas calendars for my church. I ate their fruitcake and petted their old dogs with bad breath before they scampered away with twitching backs. I sipped the weird tea and watched TV, inhaled the curdled house odors the owner was oblivious to. Most of all, I listened to the stories. I untangled the gnarled pileups of anecdotes and convoluted tales of dead husbands, failing health, childhoods of taffeta and milk that cost ten cents.
I figured if I remained in the Neverworld, alone, until the end of time, I would be like an ancient traveler wandering the side of the road with a calloused heart and hands, weighted with the world’s tales and secrets.
At least then, if nothing else, I would be wise.
It was inevitable that I’d be sitting there, listening to the story about the broken engagement, the dead child, the cat, when suddenly I’d see the decay. It always came out of nowhere and made me jump. Every windowpane in every single window around me would be silently cracking. Or a family photo would suddenly drop down the wall with a thump, revealing a garish rectangle of wallpaper that hadn’t seen daylight in forty years.
“What in the name of Jesus is going on…?”
In Mrs. Kahn’s case, it began with a faint popping noise.
“Damn raccoon’s got in again,” she muttered, tightening her robe. When she started shrieking in the den, I ran to her, astonished, to find her prized collection of snow globes—gifts from Paul, a lost suitor—detonating like grenades, water and snow and glass, plastic Santas, Eiffel Towers, St. Peter’s Basilicas, exploding around the room.
Mrs. Kahn shielded her face. “It’s the Day of Judgment!”
Of course, I’d noticed the deterioration before, back at my house with my mom. Again that night at the Crow. I didn’t know why, or what it meant, but whenever I was away from Wincroft, the world began to decay and disintegrate around me.
It always made me scared. I ran away, muttering some excuse and that I’d be back tomorrow, leaving Mrs. Kahn, Mr. Appleton, Mrs. Janowitz, Miss Bellossi, bent over, disconcerted, as they inspected the rot, the mold, the cracks traveling like lengthening skeletal fingers along the windows. I’d sprint back to Wincroft to search the gardens and grounds for the Keeper. I wanted to confront him, demand to know what was happening.
Yet, bafflingly, whenever I willed him to appear, he stayed away.
The corrosion appeared to be getting stronger. What did it mean? Was the Neverworld going to swallow itself like a black hole? Were we running out of time to vote? Was it all because of what happened to Jim?
The answer jolted me like an electric shock.
Jim. It had to be because of Jim.
* * *
—
Then came the day Wit didn’t leave.
I discovered her upstairs, buried under an avalanche of duvet, her face swollen with tears as she watched Heathers on her laptop. I stared at her, dumbfounded. I felt like some shipwreck survivor finding another person who’d washed up alive on my island.
She glared at me. “Leave me alone, Bee.”
I was worried I’d frighten her away, so I did just what she said. I made her tea, left the mug on her bedside table, and ducked out.
The next wake, to my relief, she was there again, watching The Breakfast Club; the wake after that, Goonies. I always left her tea. Then, one wake, as I did, she threw off the comforter and surveyed me with a sad smile.
“Want to watch Ferris Bueller with me?”
Cannon reappeared a few wakes later. Mayhem, as it turned out, wasn’t as much fun without an accomplice. He was as exhausted as Whitley, holed up in the library with his laptop in DOS mode, typing some mysterious hacker’s command as the screen belched code. I printed out an obscure article written by a Stanford doctorate student about the future of Internet security and left it next to his laptop for him. The next wake, it was an essay about Steven Spielberg and brain cloning written by a freshman scientist at Harvard, then a blog posting by some genius sixteen-year-old Cambridge student about the future of robotics.
“How are you finding these articles?” Cannon asked once before I darted out. “I mean, they’re so obscure.”
With all my free time in the Neverworld, I’ve read the entire Internet. Twice.
“I just stumbled upon them.”
He smiled. “They’re really cool. Thanks, Bee.”
Shortly after that, Kip stopped going hitchhiking. The moment he strolled into Wincroft, I couldn’t help it. I threw my arms around him, hugging him.
“Sister Bee, you’re breakin’ my neck. I’m not Elvis back from the dead, child.”
He pulled away, said nothing more, headed upstairs. Yet I could tell from his faint smile that he was happy to see me. That night I made him Boudreaux’s Stomp Shrimp Gumbo, the recipe served in his favorite hole-in-the-wall café in Moss Bluff. I left him a bowl in the bedroom where he was holed up watching Hoarding: Buried Alive on TLC.
“How’d you get Auntie Mo’s secret recipe?” he blurted, incredulous.
I had a million wakes to make her believe I was her long-lost niece.
“Just whipped it up,” I said with a shrug.
So there they were, three wild animals I was doing my best to cajole into remaining at the zoo in captivity, rather than roaming the wild.