Neverworld Wake(9)

I watched the woods, searching for movement, trying to steady my drunken head.

Suddenly, music erupted from inside, overlaying the storm with a soundtrack, softening the night’s edge. With a deep breath, I shut the door and bolted it. Whitley was right. He was probably just looking to recruit people for his church.

Still, I walked past Kip and Martha, curled up stroking Gandalf on the couch, and took out my phone, stepping into the hall. My mom answered on the first ring.

“Bee? Is everything all right?”

I could tell from her anxious tone that she and my dad were both still awake, doubtlessly reading in bed: Dad, one of his thirty-pound presidential biographies, Mom trying to read a thriller by James Patterson, though she’d probably been skimming the same paragraph four, five times before blurting “I don’t understand why she had to go see them. They still have some mysterious hold on her.” Then Dad, with the patient, knowing stare over his glasses: “If she wants to see them she can, Victoria. She’s an adult. She’s stronger than you give her credit for.”

I realized I had no idea why I was calling, except to hear her voice.

“It’s too late to drive back, so I’m spending the night,” I said.

“Well, your father needs you at the Crow for opening. Sleepy Sam called to say he’s having a tooth pulled.”

“I’ll be there.”

She lowered her voice: “How’s it going with them? Can you talk? You sound upset.”

“Everything’s fine. I love you.”

“We love you too, Bumble. We’re here if you need us.”

I hung up, just as Whitley and Cannon were returning from the surveillance room.

“No sign of him on the cameras,” said Cannon.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“This night gets an A-plus in weird,” slurred Martha.

“Wasn’t it hilarious how he asked to be called the Keeper?” said Kip, shaking his head. “The man looked like more of an Eastern European Santa Claus.”

Whitley wrinkled her nose. “That was my Internet password for everything for years. I’m not even kidding. The keeper one-two-three.”

In the end, the consensus was he was Just One of Those Things, one of life’s untied shoelaces. As the thunderstorm raged on, however, lightning cracking and thunder yowling, at one point a giant oak branch crashed onto the back deck, demolishing the entire railing.

We jumped, staring at each other, doubtlessly imagining the same thing: here it was, the beginning of the horror to which that funny old man had been the creepy prelude.

Only nothing happened.

Another hour passed. Whitley talked about being sexually harassed by her boss at the San Francisco law firm where she’d had an internship all summer. Cannon couldn’t tell if he was in love with his girlfriend, an international fencing champion.

“Love is this elusive bird,” he said. “You’re the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan.”

“You’re mistaking love for perfection,” I said. “Real love when it’s there? It’s just there. It’s a metal folding chair.”

When no one said anything, I realized, embarrassed, I’d blurted this as a clumsy way to bring up Jim. And I was about to. Then Whitley got up to get more Royal Salute, and Kipling muttered that he hadn’t been this wasted since he was nine, and the moment was gone.

“I’ll tell you what love is,” said Martha, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once you think it’s there and give voice to it? It’s not there anymore. It’s over here. Then way over here. Then here. You can’t trap it or contain it no matter how hard you try.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard Martha speak in such a way—the first time for the others too, if their surprised glances were any indication. Being allergic to romance was her shtick. If ever you asked her whom she had a crush on, she’d blink at you like you had three heads: “Why would I waste time—a highly precious, constantly diminishing resource—on transitory neurological fluctuations of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin?” When she saw couples holding hands in the halls, she gave them a cartoonishly wide berth.

“In case they’re contagious,” she said. And she wasn’t joking.

The conversation meandered on as rain peppered the windows.

At one point Kip started calling me Sister Bee again, which made Cannon blurt that I was the one person at school no one, not a teacher or student, a parent, a maintenance worker, or even an ant, could ever say anything bad about.

“And your nice isn’t even irritating,” said Cannon.

“Remember how in biology,” said Kip, smirking, “Bee didn’t even tell Mr. Jetty that Chad Burman had just thrown up his entire lunch all over the back of her blouse? She just sat there heroically answering his question about osmosis and then excused herself.”

“And the field trip to D.C. when Mr. Miller had to go home to his pregnant wife, and rather than summon another teacher from campus to chaperone, Ms. Guild just asked Bee.”

They cackled with laughter.

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” I said.

During this conversation, Whitley remained tellingly silent, a smug expression on her face as she stared at the floor, as if she begged to differ, as if she wanted to laugh.