Chapter Eleven
The fireplace in her room was cold when Calisa returned, and she stared at it for a moment, then shook her head.
She had much larger questions than an inconsistent fire.
She felt as if the very foundation stones beneath her feet were crumbling.
If what she saw was real…then everything about the world was different than she thought it was.
Calisa picked up the phone on the bedside table, and before she could talk herself out of it, she dialed her home number. It rang. And rang. And rang until voicemail picked up. She didn’t leave a message. She tried Mom-Kate’s cell phone. Voicemail too. She tried Mom-Elise.
After one ring, Mom-Elise answered, “Calisa!”
There was background noise: voices, music. Mom-Elise must be out somewhere. It was Tuesday—errand day. I can’t have this conversation while she’s in public. “Hey, just…calling to say hi,” Calisa said.
“So good to hear your voice!” In the background, she heard a man asking Mom-Elise whether she wanted a quarter pound or a half. “Quarter of the cheddar. Half of the cranberry Wensleydale.” To Calisa, she said, “Honey, I’m at Brew Cheese. Can I call you when I’m home? Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Calisa said. She paced beside her bed, as far as she could before the phone cord went taut. “Just had a question. Actually more of a question for Mom-Kate.”
“She’s got work meetings all day, but I’ll tell her. You can call back tonight, if you want? Are you sure everything’s all right? Do you feel okay? Is Auntie Zee being nice to you? I know she can be…brusque, but she’ll warm up to you, I’m certain of it.”
“Listen—do you know if…” She had no idea how to ask the question, especially in any way that Mom-Elise could answer while she was out in public.
Stretching the phone cord, she crossed to the window and looked out at the mountains blanketed in pine trees.
“Is there something special about the inn that I should know about?”
“It is a special place, especially to Kate,” Mom-Elise said. More carefully, she added, “I think she’s hoping you’ll discover all the things that made it special to her, when she was a kid.”
That…was a kind of answer all on its own.
Unless Calisa was reading into it what she wanted to hear?
“I think I’m beginning to?” She didn’t know how to put what she’d seen into words, or if she was ready to.
If she said it, it would make it real, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for it to be real. She wasn’t even sure what it was.
“No, half pound of the Wensleydale.” Then to Calisa again: “Give the inn a chance. I know it’s not what you were expecting—”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“—but it could be wonderful. And I think…Yes, half pound. I think you’re exactly what that place needs. You’ll give it a chance, won’t you? Open a few doors, both metaphorically and literally?”
For an instant, Calisa couldn’t breathe.
“Calisa?” Mom-Elise sounded worried.
She felt dizzy, and her knees wobbled like Jell-O. Leaning her head against the window, she looked down and saw Steve curled on top of the statue’s head, beside the apple tree. “I’ll give it a chance,” she promised.
“That’s my girl,” Mom-Elise said. “Love you to the moon.”
“Love you to the stars,” Calisa said, staring down at the statue with Steve sunning his lizardy body. “And back.”
The phone clicked, and she returned to the bedside table and placed it on the receiver. Staring at it, she reminded herself to inhale and exhale.
Across the room, the fire began to inexplicably blaze in the fireplace again, flames dancing over the logs. “No,” she told it. “No. I have to think.”
She grabbed Jack’s father’s cookbook and bolted out of the room, refusing to look back at the weirdly temperamental fire. She had too many questions. She felt as if they were all swirling inside her, threatening to rise up into her throat and choke her.
She’d bake the cake, and then…she had a lot of questions for Auntie Zee. Of course, she wasn’t sure if she’d be allowed to ask any of them, and she had no idea where to begin.
First, make the cake. And breathe. She needed to remember to breathe.
In the kitchen, Calisa read the recipe twice, three times, before actually focusing on the words.
I’ll need flour, sugar, eggs, butter, vanilla, salt, baking powder, vegetable oil, milk…
. A minute later, she had all the ingredients out of the cabinets and strewn across the counter.
After a bit of searching, she found two cake pans.
She’d make a two-layer cake and spread jam between the layers.
She’d seen some raspberry jam in one of the cabinets.
It was almost like a Victoria sponge cake, minus the cream.
No thinking. No questions.
Not yet.
As Calisa mixed the dry ingredients, she glanced out the back window and saw that the statue was no longer with the lizard beside the apple tree.
Instead, it was on the path to the greenhouse.
Its hands were clasped again, and it was in profile, as if looking out at the mountains.
Calisa paused, gawked for a moment, and then turned back to stirring even more vigorously.
“It could be wonderful,” Mom-Elise had said on the phone.
She knew, Calisa realized.
“Open a few doors, both metaphorically and literally?”
She absolutely knew.
Maybe both her moms had known all along, even back as far as the visit with the chocolate strawberries.
I can understand them not telling me then.
But why not before I got on the train? Even a hint.
Or a warning. Would that have been so terrible?
Hey, just a heads-up, Calisa, they could have said, there’s something about the inn we think you should know.
Whisking the sugar with the milk and vanilla, Calisa tried not to feel lied to again. It hadn’t been Mom-Elise’s secret to spill. Or even Mom-Kate’s. They must have felt they couldn’t tell her. Maybe they’d expected Auntie Zee to fill her in.
Or maybe they thought I wouldn’t believe it until I saw it.
She began to stir less vigorously.
That could be true. She would’ve thought they were joking.
She might not have even come if she’d believed it was all some elaborate prank.
The more she thought about it, the more Calisa thought that was likely it.
Her moms had both encouraged her to go to Vermont, despite the fact that they’d hated sending her away to one measly two-week camp the summer after eighth grade—she’d also hated that camp, mainly because her roommate had been the world’s most devoted pessimist, who talked exclusively about how much her boyfriend (also an eighth grader) had wronged her by not loving her nearly as much as his Nintendo Switch.
But she’d so obviously needed a distraction from mourning what she’d lost with Ethan… .
Behind her she heard footsteps. She didn’t turn.
“Are you making a cake?” Jack asked, eager.
She looked out again at the statue. It was in the same position, at least for now.
Jack has answers, she thought. But would he tell her the truth if she asked?
She wanted to think yes—she liked him—but she couldn’t be certain.
Besides, how did she phrase the question she really wanted to ask?
Should she hint around it? Coax it out of him?
Hope he volunteered it? Eh, screw it. She’d never been good at subtle.
“Yep, a cake,” Calisa said. In a cheerful perky-casual voice, she asked, “So, are the guests from other worlds?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Just wondering.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Because there seem to be portals in the guest room closets.”
He looked as if she’d dumped a bucket of ice water on his head. She considered that maybe just jumping into the question non sequitur–style had not been the best approach.
She stirred harder. Come on. Tell me the truth. Please.
“Uh, no. What? Portals? Closets? Haha…”
He was choosing to lie to her.
Like Ethan.
Ethan had lied to her again and again, and when finally caught, he’d tried to gaslight her into disbelieving the overwhelming evidence in front of her eyes.
It didn’t feel good to have that happening again.
“Of course there aren’t,” Jack said. “You must have been dreaming. I have the strangest dreams sometimes—this one time, I dreamed I was a moose, and I had these really heavy antlers, which was funny because I don’t actually have antlers—”
“You’re lying to me,” Calisa cut in. “You’ve been lying to me since the second I got here, and you’re continuing to try to lie to me. Badly. Really, really badly.”
He slumped. “I…”
“You have your reasons, I’m sure,” she said flatly. She tried to match Auntie Zee’s thundercloud glare, imagining that a lightning bolt would strike him if he lied again. “But whatever they are, you can stop now. I’ve seen the portals—are they portals?”
He glanced at the window as if he were longing to jump out of it and run off into the forest like Melidor, cawing wildly all the way.
“If you don’t start talking,” Calisa said, “I’m going to go to Auntie Zee and ask her every question I have.”
His body jerked, and he paled. “She’ll fire me. Instantly. I can’t lose this job. You don’t understand. It’s more than a job; it’s my home. It’s my future.”
Calisa continued to glare. She was not going to be distracted by how uncomfortable and unhappy he looked. She didn’t care how puppylike he was. Or how angelically handsome. He’d lied to her with every word and every smile.
“I can’t lose my place here,” Jack pleaded.
“You haven’t been here long enough to know, but this inn…
it’s special. When I was a kid, it was full every single night, with a waiting list a mile long.
Our guests were desperate to come. Even now, when it’s falling apart and we can’t even guarantee breakfast, much less tea, our regulars still come back…
.” She could hear the worry in his voice, woven into each word. “It’s still special.”
He’s scared, Calisa realized, and she felt some of her anger drain away. He wasn’t the one who had really lied to her. That was Auntie Zee. And her moms, if they knew, which she thought they probably did.
Unable to keep looking at his wide, bright eyes, Calisa poured the batter into the two cake pans.
In a calmer voice, she said, “Look, Jack, I’m here, and I’m figuring things out.
Slowly and clumsily, and it’s way too late to stop now.
If you’d rather that I didn’t do something irreversibly embarrassing for the inn that will piss off Auntie Zee, it would be best to tell me what’s really going on here.
I’m not going to stop wondering, so don’t you think it’s safer for everyone if I’m not just bumbling around trying to find answers on my own?
” She slid the cakes into the oven and then turned to face him.
He looked like a rabbit cornered by a wolf. She almost felt sorry for him.
“Jack? I’m right, aren’t I? About the closet doors?” Calisa asked.
He shook his head. Squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them. And then he said, “It’s any door. Sometimes. And sometimes not. I don’t know exactly how it works, but certain doors open to certain places. Except when they don’t.”
And there it was.
Unless this was a joke.
It’s not a joke. She’d seen it, walked through it, visited…“certain places.” “Where do they go? How do they work?” How is any of this possible?
“Auntie Zee is the only one who can make the doors cooperate at all.”
She thought of the first door she’d opened: the broom closet with the howling darkness. After Auntie Zee had slammed it shut, it was an ordinary broom closet. She should have guessed that Auntie Zee herself was a key element.
Jack continued, “Auntie Zee is, like, the caretaker of the inn’s doors.
She’s the one who says whether a door works as a portal or as, um, you know, a closet or bathroom or whatever.
” His eyes slid to the foyer, as if he were expecting Auntie Zee to charge into the kitchen and demand that they stop talking.
“What do you know?”
“The bed-and-breakfast is a nexus,” Jack said. “A nexus of realms.”
She absorbed that. “And what exactly does that mean?”
He shrugged. “Lots of doors to other worlds.”
Again, for an instant, Calisa couldn’t breathe.
She’d been right—there really were other worlds through those doorways.
Actual other worlds. I’ve been to other worlds!
That was why the sun had felt and looked so strange and why the smells from the night market had been so unfamiliar.
There wasn’t anything like it on Earth, because she hadn’t been on Earth.
She’d known it, but she hadn’t known it. A nexus of realms.
“It’s rare, a place like this,” Jack said. “That’s why it’s so special. It’s a place where people can come to escape. A real getaway, for whoever needs it.”
“So the guests…they’re actually from other worlds? Realms, you said?”
“I think of them as ‘realms’ because, as my dad explained to me, they’re not other planets.
At least not other planets in our solar system.
It’s not like Kendra is from Venus, and Mulligan is from the moon or even Alpha Centauri.
They’re just from other places. Faraway places.
Like pocket dimensions, if you want to sound all sci-fi about it, which you shouldn’t because Auntie Zee hates that. ”
“Wow.” She tried to wrap her mind around this. “How many…” No, that wasn’t what she wanted to ask next. “Are you from another realm?”
He shook his head. “Vermont born and bred. Like my dad.”
“And Auntie Zee?” Calisa asked.
Jack looked surprised by the question. “I never asked.”
From upstairs, Auntie Zee called, “Jack, third floor!”
Both of them froze. Had she somehow heard them talking? She couldn’t have. Did she find out that Calisa had opened doors that she shouldn’t have opened? She could have. What was Auntie Zee going to say? And what was she going to do?
I can’t go home! Not now!
Auntie Zee called, “Bring the plunger!”
And both Calisa and Jack exhaled in unison.