Chapter Eighty-Nine All Is Not Flossed
Above us, the sky gives one more giant burst of thunder and then everything goes quiet. The rain stops. The wind grows still. And the lightning and thunder cease in an instant.
“What the fuck?” Luis exclaims. “Did the storm just…stop?”
“My bad,” says the man from the tapestry. “My friends can be a little overly enthusiastic, and they’ve been looking for me for a while.”
“What does that mean?” Ember demands.
“You didn’t actually think that was a hurricane, did you?” He tsk-tsks, then turns to Simon. “I thought a mermaid would know better.”
Simon’s teeth clench. “Siren.”
The man waves his hand. “Tomato, to-mah-toe,” he says as he breezes by us.
“Umm, excuse me,” Mozart starts, but the man ignores her.
So Izzy steps in, putting herself right in his path and demanding, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Come now, Isadora.” He shakes his head, looking to all the world like a disappointed father. “A difficult childhood is no excuse to be profane.”
“Yeah, well, jumping out of a tapestry is no excuse to be a dick, but that doesn’t seem to bother you any,” she shoots back.
He just laughs. “You always were quick on the uptake.”
I wait for him to say something else, but instead he just crosses to the table in the middle of the room and picks up Luis’s backpack. Then he pulls out the bottle of water he’s got tucked into a side pocket and drains the whole thing in one long gulp.
“I apologize.” He gives Luis a rueful look. “It’s been ten years since I had a glass of water. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“Ten years?” I repeat. “Is that how long you’ve been trapped in that tapestry?”
His face grows contemplative as he looks me over from head to toe. At first, I think it’s because of the question I asked, but then he steps forward, hand extended. “There you are, my darling Clementine. I’ve been waiting to meet you for a long time.”
“Ten years, perhaps?” I ask dryly. But I make no move to shake his hand. Call me suspicious, but shaggy-haired men who pop out of tapestries definitely don’t rank high on my list of people to trust. To be fair, it’s never been a long list, and it was shrinking even before this guy showed up.
“Perhaps.” He scans the faces of everyone else, but his gaze lingers longest on Jude. “It’s good to see you, my old friend.”
I expect Jude to be as flummoxed as the rest of us, but he actually seems the most chill. Or maybe a better description would be the least disturbed. “That picture of the manticores playing poker was genius,” he tells him.
“Wasn’t it?” The man laughs. “Too bad I can’t take credit for it. That was all Clementine’s idea. She is a clever one.” He beams at me like a teacher with a star pupil.
I don’t even know how to respond, so I just keep watching him. To be fair, we all do.
Though, after a minute, he does say, “Will you excuse me for a moment, please?”
“It’s a one-room cellar,” I tell him. “There’s not a lot of places to excuse yourself to.”
He just smiles at me before walking into the corner and disappearing. Well, not really disappearing. It’s more like he’s hiding himself behind a blurry curtain.
Seconds later, the sound of him turning on a faucet fills the room. “What. The. Fuck?” Simon looks back and forth between the blurry corner and Jude. “Who the hell is that guy?
And why the fuck is he gargling in here?”
“Beats me,” Jude answers.
“What do you mean? He just called you ‘old friend’!” I tell him.
“To be fair, it looks like we’ve shared this cellar for the last ten years. As for who he is? I have no clue. I’m guessing he’s the guy who’s been controlling the tapestry all along. When I was little, he’d make funny pictures in the tapestry to make me laugh. When I got older, they weren’t so funny.” He shrugs. “Other than that, I have no idea who he is or what he was doing in there.”
“I can tell you one thing he wasn’t doing,” Ember says as a shower turns on behind the blurry curtain. “He wasn’t showering.”
True freaking story.
“And you never thought to ask him?” Mozart sounds as incredulous as I feel.
“To be fair, I never saw him. All I’ve ever known is that the tapestry changes regularly. For all I knew it was a bunch of nightmares making the pictures.”
“You know what? I’m out,” Izzy says, walking to the bookshelf and pulling the jar that opens the top part of the cellar. “Call me when the grooming routine is over.”
“I’m coming with you,” Mozart says.
I watch as Luis walks up the stairs after them and try not to freak out at how faint future Luis is looking now.
“Hey,” Jude asks as everyone but Remy files upstairs. “What’s wrong?”
I don’t want to say it out loud—certainly nowhere Luis might overhear—so I just shake my head. “This seeing-in-triplicate thing is a giant pain, sometimes.”
“I can probably help you with that,” Remy says. “When I was first able to see the future, I couldn’t block it out, either. It was there, all the time, which—as I’m sure you know—makes it hard to do anything.”
“Really hard,” I tell him. He definitely has my attention.
And Jude’s, too, judging by how intently he’s listening to our conversation. Remy nods like he understands because, apparently, he does. “I do this thing now that helps block what I don’t want to see. I could show you how to do it if you want.”
“Show me how to not see everyone in this room three different ways all at the same time?” I ask. “Yes, please!”
He nods, then pulls me into the corner opposite the blurry curtain. “I like to think of it as building a door between me and all the future,” he tells me. “One that I can open whenever and however I want.”
“Okay.” That sounds reasonable. “How do I do it?”
He laughs ruefully. “I’ve never actually taught anyone how to do it before, so bear with me. But I’d say you start by picking something—or in your case, someone—that you’re seeing in the past, present, and future.”
“That’s pretty much everybody in here, except for Jude.”
“Okay, then. You can start by focusing on me.” He steps back a little so I can get a better view of all three versions of him—Remy about fourteen, again in the present, and then finally at what I’d guess is about thirty.
“Now, once you can see all three versions, I want you to imagine closing a door on either the past or the future one.”
I start to do what he says—it seems easy enough. But after four or five attempts, I still haven’t gotten anywhere.
“It’s not working,” I tell him, frustrated.
“Yet,” he says with a grin. “It’s not working yet.”
“Same thing.”
He laughs. “Start smaller—”
“I am starting smaller. It’s still not working.”
He tilts his head to the side for a moment, studying me. Then asks, “What kind of door are you picturing?”
“I don’t know. A door.”
“That’s not good enough. If this is going to work, you need to really know what the door you’re closing looks like. Is it black with ornate molding? Brown wood with a peephole? White with a little wreath hanging on it? How can you expect to actually be able to close a door if you can’t see what it looks like?”
I think about what he says for a minute, then close my eyes and try to do as he asks. But every time I try to picture a plain white door, my mind replaces it with a window—and not just any window, a stained glass window with three distinct colors. Red, purple, and green.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that each of the colors is supposed to correspond with a time period, so I randomly assign them—red to the past, purple to the present, and green to the future.
And then I try my hand at closing all of Remy behind the window.
It takes a few different times, but eventually it gets to the point where I don’t see him at all—like I can block the present Remy just as easily as the past or future Remy. And anytime I want to see one of them again, I crack open the corresponding window.
“You’ve got it!” Remy says when I try to explain to him what I did. “That’s brilliant.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, just as the shower finally stops.
Jude calls up to the others, and as they start coming down the stairs, I turn to them and try to do the same thing I just did with Remy. It takes a little more doing—each one requires his or her own window—but eventually I’ve got it down until I only see the present version of each of them.
It’s the most amazing feeling in the world, like a giant sensory overload has just been turned off. I’ve never been more grateful to anyone in my life.
After thanking Remy again, I lean into Jude just as the sound of an electric razor starts up.
“What the actual hell?” Luis says, looking baffled.
“Hygiene is very important,” Jude says with a grin—an actual grin—that sends electric sparks dancing along my nerve endings.
Yes, I could very definitely get used to this Jude.
I turn toward Remy, wanting to thank him again for teaching me how to stay focused in the moment—with Jude and with the rest of my friends. But when I turn toward him, he’s not the only one there.