Chapter Twenty-One
After knocking loudly to no answer, Calisa let herself into kendra’s guest room with the master skeleton key.
She splashed through the film of water that had soaked the floor, and she opened the closet door.
It was, as expected, empty. She stared at it, closed the door, and reopened it.
Unlike Auntie Zee’s closet, she knew this had been an active portal recently.
She closed and reopened it again.
On the fifth try, she heard a noise behind her and turned.
“Is it doing anything?” Jack asked plaintively.
“Where’s Kendra?” Calisa asked. “Is she okay?”
“I convinced her to go outside,” Jack said. “The salt water won’t be good for the plants, but she agreed to pace on the gravel driveway. It can’t hurt the rocks.”
“Good idea. And no, it’s still not working.” Calisa crossed her arms. “Tell me everything you know about how the portals work.”
“Well, um, they’re magic.”
Calisa glared at him.
“I don’t know. They’re just there sometimes….”
“What do you mean sometimes? Be detailed.” If she could identify a pattern…
He ran his hand through his hair. “Auntie Zee doesn’t exactly welcome questions. You know that. Sometimes a closet door opens onto a portal, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you just get shoes or brooms.”
Okay, that wasn’t helpful. Didn’t he have any clue how it worked? He’d lived here for years. “Is there any kind of pattern to when a door opens to a realm and when it opens to just a closet? Any common factors?”
He considered it. “Well…Auntie Zee, of course. She’s the only one who can change an ordinary closet into a portal, and vice versa.”
“So we know it’s not just the doors themselves.
” It wasn’t new information. He’d told her that before, but it was a place to start.
“That means it’s not random, right? Auntie Zee must do something to them.
Any guesses what? What does she do, in as much detail as you know, when she opens a portal that was previously an ordinary closet? ”
“Um…I’ve never seen her do it.”
Calisa had witnessed her converting a portal to an ordinary closet but not the reverse. She didn’t think she’d seen Auntie Zee doing anything special, but then again, she’d been distracted by the howling darkness. “She never let you see, or you just didn’t notice?”
“The first. It’s not like I’m not curious. I’ve tried to watch. Lots of times. She shoos me away pretty much instantly. Last time, the statue ratted me out. She was standing outside the window, and Auntie Zee saw her pointing right where I was hiding.”
Fine. So he never saw it happen.
Could someone else have seen?
How about the statue?
Calisa wasn’t sure what the right yes-or-no questions would be to figure it out, but it was an option. There was, though, someone else a lot more talkative who could have seen. Someone who had lived here before Jack. “I need to call my mom.”
There was a phone on the bedside table—thankfully only splashed, not soaked, in seawater.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Calisa lifted the receiver and punched in the numbers to Mom-Kate’s cell phone.
She tried not to think about how awkward this phone call was going to be and instead focus on how to convince Mom-Kate to tell her exactly what she needed to know.
Mom-Kate answered immediately. “Hello, baby girl, how’s fresh air and unblemished skies?” she said chirpily.
“Great. All good. I mean, well, actually…we’re kind of having a bit of a problem here—I’m fine, totally healthy, nothing broken, and I didn’t break anything.”
“Okay. Good,” Mom-Kate said, less chirpily. “But that intro makes me think you absolutely did break something.”
“Not exactly, but yes, something is broken. Um, so…” What if Mom-Kate didn’t know about the portals?
What if she had no idea there was anything unusual at the Faraway Inn?
What was she going to think if she didn’t know and Calisa started talking about portals and realms and sea witches?
“All right, please hear me out and don’t judge me, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, pretend I saw it all in a TV show, and we’ll just hang up and forget this conversation ever happened, okay, Mom-Kate?
” She was clutching the phone so hard that her hand started to sweat.
“Cali, you’re worrying me. You know you can tell me anything.”
Calisa squeezed her eyes shut, as if that would make the words easier. “I need to know how to reopen a portal. To another realm.”
There was silence on the phone.
“Mom-Kate?”
“Oh, sweetie. It’s okay. It didn’t work for me either, and I tried so hard. It’s…it’s an innate thing. Either you can do it or you can’t. I’d hoped it might have just skipped a generation….”
Her brain stuttered as it tried to catch up with what Mom-Kate was saying.
“Wait. Are you saying…you know about the realms? You know what the B your mom says that’s different. She also wants to know if you’ve been happy and if you’re eating enough.”
Calisa laughed, slightly hysterically. “Please tell her to remember what I said about an unhappy sea witch. I really don’t want to be responsible for flooding the bed-and-breakfast.”
He relayed that. “She says you want the door to know you, to recognize you. It would help if you whispered to it? Auntie Zee used to have her spend days in doorways, learning how it felt to be in a liminal space.” Into the phone, he said, “I don’t know that we have days.”
Calisa hoped he didn’t over-worry them. They were experts at over-worrying. On the other hand, the situation was a bit on the dire side. Or at least the wet side.
“As you’re touching the doorframe,” Jack parroted, “focus on what it means to cross a threshold. To change. To transform. To grow.”
That was…rather mushy. And vague.
“She says she never really understood it either. But Auntie Zee was insistent that portal openings were about being open to change, to new experiences, to new emotions.”
“Well, I’m feeling brand-new anxiety and fear, does that count?”
Jack relayed that. “That’s not precisely what she had in mind. I think it has to be a positive emotion?” He paused, listening, and then said, “She said that to unlock your potential, you have to experience a fundamental positive change while in the doorway. You need to experience an epiphany.”
“Seriously? How am I supposed to do that?”
He asked the question and then reported, “She says she can’t tell you. It’s different for everyone, and it has to be true and honest. You need to unlock yourself before you can unlock a gateway to a realm. Especially the first time. You’ve got to free your power.”
She glared at the phone, as if Mom-Kate could feel her glare across the miles. “Tell her that this is not at all like Luke Skywalker’s training.”
He relayed that. “She said it kind of is. ‘You will find only what you bring in.’ ”
Calisa snorted. “Anything else?”
He asked and then shook his head. “She said that’s the first step.
You need to master this before you can proceed.
Unlock yourself, and you’ll unlock the magic within you.
After that you’ll be able to command the portal to open.
Theoretically. She says she never got past the first step, she says she believes in you, and she’s proud of you no matter what.
” He paused, listening. “Um, she says she loves you to Pluto and back?”
“Okay, tell her thank you and I love her and I’m going to try.”
He repeated that, then said, “She said, ‘Do or do not; there is no try.’ ” He hung up the phone and then came to stand by her.
Calisa took a deep breath and then another. It was possible she couldn’t do what Auntie Zee could. Her mother couldn’t. But she could try. “That’s bullshit advice. There’s always try.”
“I think it’s supposed to be motivational. Like, it means believe in yourself?”
I do believe. She’d seen incredible things from the moment she’d arrived.
She’d walked into other realms! She’d talked with magical beings!
She’d served them cake! It was entirely possible this would work.
After all, she was descended from Auntie Zee, as she’d told Rin; she could have inherited the “ability.”
Inch by inch, she ran her fingers along the doorframe. She concentrated, digging deep, looking for the kind of revelatory bolt of self-confidence that would let her do something magical, a positive epiphany—she needed to believe that she could do something unique, needed, and wonderful.
A voice whispered inside her, What makes you special?
I’m Auntie Zee’s grandniece, she answered.
So? What makes you think that matters? Your mother couldn’t open portals, and she grew up here. Mom-Kate had seen magic throughout her childhood and still couldn’t make it manifest in herself.
What kind of epiphany would unlock her power, if she had any?
Did she have to want it badly enough? Was that the key? I do want it! She wanted to help the bed-and-breakfast. She wanted it to succeed and last.
Why?
Why. That was an excellent question. She’d only known that magic existed for a few weeks.
As for the guests, they weren’t family or friends.
Not yet. She liked them. She wanted Melidor to be able to raise her seedlings, knowing she could always return to visit.
And Mulligan and Zef—she wanted them to be happy. She wanted Auntie Zee to come back.
She also wanted Jack to keep his home, to be able to continue to wait for his father to find his way home. She wanted to ease that stress and fear that she saw lurking behind Jack’s smile. This was all he had. And she had the chance to save it for him.
Why did she care?
She barely knew him.
Except she did know him. She’d walked into other realms with him. He’d told her secrets that she knew he’d never shared with anyone—about the magic, his childhood, his father. He’d trusted her in a way that no one ever had before. He listened to her. He respected her.
Opening her eyes, Calisa turned to look at Jack.
He shifted, glancing behind him. “What?”
“Come here,” she said.
He took a step toward her until he was nearly in the doorway to the closet as well. Inches from him, she knew what to do.
“Kiss me,” Calisa said. She added, “Please?”