Chapter Nineteen
“We can’t keep doing this,” Jack said. It was the next day, and they’d just returned from another visit—this one to a realm where the people were silent but their shadows spoke. “We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Not lucky enough,” Calisa said. “If we were actually lucky, we would have found her. Or at least found someone who’d seen her.” She slumped into the window seat in the library.
The ladder wiggled hopefully.
“Sorry, I can’t read now,” Calisa told it. “Having a crisis.”
“After my dad…” Jack’s voice hitched. He stopped, swallowed, and continued. “After my dad went missing, I searched for him. Every door I could open, I went through. Calisa…I’ve done this before. It didn’t help.”
“If we don’t look for her, who will?” Calisa asked. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could go to the police for: Hello, 911, my great-aunt is missing in another dimension. Besides, she wasn’t really missing. Just…they didn’t know where she was.
Calisa kept expecting to find her visiting with friends or taking a mini-vacation, but they’d been to multiple realms now and no one had seen her. They were nearly out of places to look. They’d visited nearly every realm that had been mentioned as a source of supplies.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and glanced toward the lobby, but it was only the cat sauntering by. Calisa sighed heavily.
“Rin said she’ll show up when she’s ready to show up,” Jack said, “but what if she doesn’t want to be found? What if she didn’t go for supplies at all, and that’s why none of her usual suppliers have seen her?”
“What do you mean?” Calisa asked. Why would she want that?
He leaned against one of the bookshelves. Nearby, the firebird crackled, as low as embers. “What if she just…went away? You heard her before she left. She’s tired. Maybe she needed a more permanent break.”
That…was possible.
It could be that the reason no one had seen Auntie Zee was she didn’t want to be found.
This place, the Faraway Inn, was an escape for the guests—a break from their lives.
Auntie Zee could have decided she needed an escape too, from the Faraway Inn.
In that case, she could have chosen any portal to any realm.
She could have even shut the door behind her.
Jack said hesitantly, “I think…we may have to wait for her to come back on her own. Unlike my dad, she can open the doors herself. She’ll return when she’s ready.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“I know. I don’t…” He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Maybe I just need some sleep.”
Maybe they both did. Maybe one of them would come up with a new idea in the morning.
Maybe there was a supplier they’d missed.
Or maybe they should be looking at other locations, the less commonly visited realms, without obvious suppliers?
They were still a few doors they hadn’t tried…
. Or maybe we’ve pushed our luck far enough, and we should try being patient.
Auntie Zee had her own way of doing things, and she could have a perfectly good reason for her absence, which she’d explain as soon as she returned.
Or maybe something has happened to her and she can’t return?
As always whenever that worry reared its head, Calisa shoved it back down. Nothing could have happened to Auntie Zee. She was the caretaker of the inn, the keeper of the doors, and she was fine. Just…absent.
Possibly intentionally absent.
The guests had started to notice. No one had said anything directly yet, but Mulligan had hinted at it a few times, and Kendra had made pointed comments about the decline in service.
It was only a matter of time before one of them demanded to speak to Auntie Zee, and then what would they do?
How long could they keep pretending she was on her way back or “Oh, so sorry, you just missed her”?
After saying good night to Jack, Calisa returned to her room and changed into her nightshirt and flannel shorts.
Looking out the window, she saw the stream (finally free of the brambles), a shiny black ribbon in the light of the moon, winding out of the forest. Standing beside it, near where the seedlings were planted, was the statue.
She looked as if she were guarding the baby dryads. Perhaps she was.
Beyond, the stars were sprinkled above the mountains.
Calisa lifted up the window and leaned against the sill.
Outside, crickets chirped. She heard the wind rustle the leaves in the trees.
It smelled sweet, like earth and pine, and she didn’t know how Mom-Kate had ever left this place.
Brooklyn felt so far away, and she wasn’t sure—
The phone on the bedside table rang, and Calisa jumped.
She’d forgotten there was a phone. Her moms. They’d been intent on giving her space, waiting until she reached out to them so that they wouldn’t intrude on her time here.
In fact, they’d showed impressive self-restraint.
So why were they calling now? Did they know about Auntie Zee?
They couldn’t—there was no one here who’d think to tell them.
Had something happened at home? Were they okay? Calisa hurried across the room.
She picked up the phone. “Hello? What’s wrong?”
A familiar male voice said, “You aren’t here. That’s what’s wrong.”
Ethan.
She felt a lurch. Her knees bent, and suddenly she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She felt catapulted back into her old life more forcefully than walking through a portal. “Ethan.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Cali.” He was the only one who’d ever called her that.
“Why are you calling?” she asked. “How did you get this number?”
“Charm,” he said. “Pleading. Patheticness. Please, Cali, just hear me out. It took me days to work up the courage to call and hours to figure out what I wanted to say.”
Half of her wanted to hang up the phone. But her fingers curled around the receiver, and she couldn’t seem to make herself move.
“I’m going to assume you’re still there, because I haven’t heard any kind of click.
Okay, here goes: I am calling to say that I know I screwed up, I’m sorry, and I want you back.
Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it. Grovel—I’ll grovel like no one has ever groveled before.
Public apology—I will buy a billboard if that’s what it takes.
I made a colossal mistake, and I am begging you to forgive me. ”
Well.
Wow.
This was it, the apology she’d so desperately wanted to hear but thought she never would. She never expected he’d so much as offer up a cavalier “my bad” much less a full-on monologue. “Did you write that out?”
There was a beat of silence. “Yes?”
“Did someone else write it for you?”
“I may have had some help. But it’s my feelings, Cali love. All my heart.”
She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. He’d cared enough to enlist help—was that nice? “Who helped you?” It better not have been Jocelyn Pullman….
“Crystal.”
She sucked in air, feeling as if her heart stuttered. Crystal? Her best friend Crystal? She could guess now who had given him the phone number. She must have gotten it from Mom-Elise.
She thinks this is what I want.
It had been what she wanted. Before coming to Vermont, she’d had countless daydreams of Ethan begging her forgiveness, wanting her back—
“Why?” Calisa asked.
“Because you’re the one for me,” Ethan said. “I can see that now.”
“You cheated on me, multiple times with multiple girls, according to, well, everyone. That was a choice—a choice you kept making over and over. It wasn’t an accident or an out-of-control moment. It was a pattern of behavior, and you’ve now changed?”
“People change. Hey, you’ve probably gotten all crunchy granola up in Vermont. Made friends with bears and stuff. Are you dating a lumberJack? Is that why you’re being so cold to me?”
Now she was going to hang up.
But his voice softened. “Cali, I screwed up. You didn’t deserve it, and it was never about you. It was all me and my ego.”
That was exactly what Crystal had said, when Calisa first went crying to her after catching Ethan and listening to his flimsy excuses.
Clearly he wasn’t lying about talking to Crystal, which was a surprise—first because he’d never liked Calisa’s friends, and second because Crystal usually didn’t put up with bullshit.
But the greater surprise was that he’d actually listened to her.
He sounded sincere…. Then again, this was also the boy who’d deceived her for months and she’d been blithely unaware, completely swallowing every one of his lies about where he’d been, whom he’d been with, and what he’d done.
“How do you expect me to trust you?” she asked, gripping the phone so hard that her hand started to sweat.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Ethan promised. “Whatever you need me to do or say…If you want to check my texts…If you want to hire a random kid to spy on me…Whatever it takes.”
Calisa laughed. She didn’t mean to, but the image was hilarious—a fourth grader skulking after Ethan as he chatted up various girls who caught his eye.
Ethan couldn’t help being charming. That was one of the things that had drawn Calisa to him.
He was at ease everywhere he went, with zero effort.
Everything always came easily to him, to the point where he never had to work for anything or doubt that he’d get what he wanted.
It’s his self-confidence. He knows what he wants, assumes he deserves it, and goes for it.
This time, he wanted her back.
“Why?” Calisa asked again.
“What do you mean? Because I love you. And I realize I was an idiot not to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”
“Why do you love me?”
“Because…you make me feel like no one else. You see me.”
She wondered if he saw her. She thought of how Jack listened to her, truly listened, both to her babble and her ideas. Had Ethan ever done that? She wondered if he knew what kind of cake she liked, what books she’d read, what her favorite season was.