Edgar #2
“I know it doesn’t make sense. Somehow we edited the story so that the book would think it needed me instead. Would think that I was the main character, and not Oliver. And it worked, for a little while. But the book has a mind of its own. When something’s not right, it corrects itself.”
“Well, of course,” my mother says, as if I have finally begun to speak English. “What you’re describing…that’s what writing is. Characters get up and walk away with a plot all the time.”
She’s not getting it. “For a few months, Oliver was pretending to be me,” I tell her, remembering what she had said earlier: I saw a boy who looked like my son…
but who I just knew wasn’t. That was what made her go to the doctor in the first place, and even if she hadn’t been delusional—just really observant—it was also what made the doctors do the tests that found the tumor.
What if they hadn’t? Would she not even know she was sick?
Would that be better?
I push aside the thought. “Oliver is Delilah’s boyfriend,” I continue. “Me…I was hidden inside your story.”
My mother looks from me to Delilah to Jules, as if she can’t understand our strange conspiracy. “Edgar,” she says quietly, sadly, “there’s no such thing as fairy tales.”
A long time ago, when my mother first wrote that book, she thought otherwise. I guess life can take you to a place where you are completely different from the person you used to be.
Before I know what’s happening, Jules yanks the book out of Delilah’s arms. She flips it open to the page where Oliver is climbing the tower wall. He looks up, sees a familiar face, and smiles. “Oliver,” she says, “there’s someone who wants to say hello.”
She turns the book so it’s facing my mother. Oliver’s eyes dart up, and when he sees my mother’s face, he looks shocked but recovers quickly. He grimaces and hangs on more tightly to the rock wall, doing his job, assuming that he isn’t supposed to speak.
I lean closer to my mother so that he can see my face too. “Oliver,” I tell him, “it’s okay to talk to her.”
Very slowly, his face turns toward us. “Hello,” he says shyly. “It’s quite a pleasure to officially meet you.”
My mother’s face goes white. “This is not happening.”
“I’m sorry, should I perhaps go back to hanging on the wall?” Oliver asks. “But before I do that—might I just say, I loved playing your son, for a little while. You are an excellent mother.”
After a long silence, my mother begins to speak. “When I was still a writer, I felt like the characters were speaking to me. I could hear them so clearly in my head.”
“Maybe they were,” Delilah says. “Maybe you just never answered.”
Once, when I was little, I came home from kindergarten and my mother wasn’t waiting for the bus at the end of the driveway.
Hunching over, wearing my backpack like a turtle shell, I called her name.
I wanted to show her the finger painting I’d done that day and give her the macaroni necklace I’d made.
But she wasn’t in the kitchen making me lunch either.
I began to walk through the house, opening doors, getting more and more panicked.
What if something bad had happened to her?
What if something bad was about to happen to me?
The last door I opened was the door to her office.
On the walls were sketches of a pirate ship, of princesses, of castles.
There was a painting on her easel of a fire-breathing dragon, and a prince staring him down, all reds and oranges that looked like the coils on the stove I wasn’t supposed to touch.
My mother was sitting in her chair. Her eyes were closed, and her head was tilted back so that her face was lifted to the ceiling.
“Mom,” I said, and when she didn’t answer, I repeated it a little louder.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “They’re talking to me.”
I looked around the room, but we were completely alone. “Who?”
At that, her eyes popped open. “The characters,” she said, and she smiled.
My mother looks at me blankly when I try to explain the concept of Easter eggs in games and videos. “It’s like when you’re watching The Phantom Menace and you realize that E.T. is in the Senate with the Palpatine supporters—”
Jules interrupts. “It’s like when you put your winter coat on for the first time in months and you find twenty bucks in your pocket.”
“So, something unexpected?” my mother says.
“Yeah,” I add, “but in video games, when you find one, you can sometimes skip a whole level of play. Or wind up at the end of the game. Or even just automatically win.”
“A shortcut,” Delilah says, simplifying. “We found the ones you put into the book: the lip-gloss compact on the copyright page, and the star cookie.”
I meet my mother’s gaze. “Every time someone reads your fairy tale, Rapscullio falls out a tower window and dies. But not really, because the next time the book is opened, there he is again, conning Oliver into helping him.” I take a deep breath.
“There is no death. There’s no sickness.
The book won’t allow it. If you can tell us where you’ve hidden just one more of those gateways, we can go inside.
And once we’re there, we get to live forever. ”
She is silent for a long moment.
“Edgar,” she says finally, “you have some imagination.”
“So did you. Which is why I think this might work.” I reach for her hand.
“You just had a conversation with Oliver, right? So you know that it’s possible to exist—no, not exist, live—inside the book…
and in spite of what you want to tell yourself, it has nothing to do with the meds you’re on.
If Oliver and Maureen are willing to trade places, and if you and I follow the plot instead of messing with it, there’s no reason the book wouldn’t take us.
Sure, I’ll have to wear tights for the rest of my life, but that’s okay, if it means you’re with me.
And there are worse things than having the day job of being a queen, right?
” I hesitate. “Mom, really, what have you got to lose?”
My mother’s been awake for an hour now, and I can see she’s exhausted. “Even if this were true, which it can’t possibly be, I couldn’t tell you where to find a portal.” She sighs. “I didn’t create them.”
I look at Delilah and Jules. “If you didn’t, who did?”
“I don’t know. Students write papers about themes and symbolism in books…and half the time, the author never planned any of it. It just happens.”
“You mean, like, subconsciously?” Jules asks.
“Maybe,” my mother admits.
“Then who’s to say there’s not another subconscious secret passage somewhere? We just have to find it,” I say.
“But they’re not what you think they are.
They’re not bonuses, or extra points. They were wishes.
The only reason they worked when they did was because the person who stumbled across them believed wholeheartedly.
A wish is just words. Belief is the catalyst. It’s what sets that wish into motion.
When two people want the same exact thing and that wish is caught between them, there’s nothing more powerful. ”
“Then why don’t wishes come true every day?” I ask her. “If we both want you to get better, how come it’s not that simple?”
She looks at me, her eyes wide and sad. “This world isn’t filled with magic,” my mother says. “Why do you think so many people escape through fiction?” She sinks into the pillow, her voice fading. “Edgar, I think I need to close my eyes for a little while.”
I slip out of the room, followed by Delilah and Jules. “Do you think she’s right?” Jules asks. “That they weren’t portals or escape hatches—they were just two people believing in something at once?”
“Then why did you get sucked into Seraphima’s wish?” Delilah asks her. “You clearly didn’t want to go into the book, but you wound up there anyway. And for the record, Oliver and I did plenty of simultaneous wishing for him to get out of the book, and it did nothing.”
“I don’t know,” I say, my mind buzzing. I don’t have the answers. I just know I have to find them, quickly.
And I think I know who might be able to help.