Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was late, so we didn’t stay long. Nancy escorted Pops, Duke, Koshka, and me to the street, where Duke had hung my umbrella on the tree branch.
“I’ll take this gentleman home where he belongs,” Pops said, elbowing Duke.
“And this one too,” Duke said. He picked up Koshka and kissed me chastely on the cheek. Pops was watching us after all. “See you soon, darling?”
“Wait,” I said. I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t run from his mother and family obligations forever. He needed to go back to England and face the past he’d left behind. But when I tried to get the words out, nothing. Silence.
I looked at Nancy. “You’re right. You can’t tell a fictional character how to change.”
She shrugged. “Told you so.”
“What was that all about?” Duke demanded.
“Nothing,” I said, then grabbed his face and kissed him hard (but not too hard, because this was still a Nancy Drew novel, after all).
“What was that for?” he asked. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You have now solved every mystery you’ve ever attempted to solve, including the mystery of us.”
“Well done me,” he said, beaming.
“Now go on. Get back in your books. I’ll be there soon.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Then he and Pops and Koshka disappeared before our eyes.
And there I was, all alone with Nancy Drew by the picket fence in front of her picturesque River Heights home lit by a single ancient streetlamp.
“As much as I hate to admit it,” I said, “it’s probably for the best I didn’t learn all this about my mother and father and you until now. If I’d learned at age fifteen? I would have disappeared into this book and never looked back.”
And since I was fictional…no one could’ve stopped me.
“Your grandparents would’ve been devastated to lose you,” Nancy said. “And all those books you restored, all those Burners you defeated…”
“And I never would’ve met Duke either. But I’m glad to know my mother was so happy here.”
“Very happy,” Nancy said. “When she left to go visit her parents, she promised to come back. She would’ve come back if she hadn’t gotten sick.”
“But if you had a mother or a stepmother keeping an eye on you,” I told her, “you never would’ve gotten away with all the wild shenanigans you got up to. Your father gave you a lot of leeway.”
“I know why my writers didn’t want me to have a mother. I needed my freedom to get into trouble and, well, this was a hundred years ago. Losing a parent was much more common then. But losing your Mums in any era…it’s terribly unfair.”
“Peripartum cardiomyopathy,” I said, because you never forget the name of the monster that killed your mother.
“Pops said she was home just two days before she started struggling to breathe. They delivered me immediately, but the damage to her heart was already done. She was in and out of the hospital, but only got sicker and weaker. Five months later, she was gone. No reason or rhyme. That’s what I hate about the real world. Death is so meaningless.”
I thought of my mother, young and in love, newly married, desperate to get back to her husband and stepdaughter.
But I was premature and she was dying. We were both too weak to leave the house, much less the real world.
Every waking moment, my mother must’ve ached for the family she’d found in the pages of The Secret of the Old Clock, the book in the photograph of us on the mantel.
That was my mother—even sick, even dying, even lonely and trapped in a world that was not her own anymore… she still read to me.
The story of my life was a story.
“I don’t think it’s meaningless,” Nancy said. “But it is a mystery, one we’re all trying to solve. How do you turn something terrible into something meaningful? I dare say it’s the greatest mystery of them all.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“Rainy?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“Can I tell you something? Without you hating me for it?”
“I could never hate you,” Nancy said. “Remember, if you were a worm, I’d rescue you off the sidewalk—”
“—and give me a leaf for an umbrella.”
She nodded. “What is it, Rainy?”
I sighed. “I have a father now and a sister. I have answers to questions I’ve been asking my whole life. I even know how Duke and I can be together.”
“All good things, I hope.”
“All good,” I said. “So why isn’t it enough? I should be thrilled. I should be dancing in the streets. But I’m…I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m being greedy.”
Nancy moved to stand in front of me. She searched my face. “Rainy, what are you saying?”
“I guess I’m saying…I want my mom.”
“Oh, Rainy.” Nancy put her arms around me. It felt like something broke in me, a dam of words. Like a child having a tantrum, hammering fists and feet on the ground, I said it again and again.
I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom.
I said it for every birthday party she missed, for every Christmas and Halloween and Easter. I said it for every boo-boo she never kissed, for every fever I ran that she never soothed with the back of her hand and a Popsicle in bed.
I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom.
I said it for every fight we never had over something stupid we laughed about later.
I said it for the homework she never reminded me to do and the tests she never helped me study for and for every assembly where I’d won a dumb child’s prize or attendance certificate without her in the audience to cheer for me.
I want my mom.
I want my mom.
I want my mom.
I said it for Duke, who would never meet her.
I said it for the grandchildren she would never hold.
I said it for Pops and Grandma, who’d had to pick out their daughter’s gravestone the same week they took their granddaughter to her six-month checkup.
I said it until I couldn’t say it anymore, until I could only feel it, like a child’s deepest, most primal need—not food or shelter but to reach out her hands and have her mother take them in hers.
“I want my mom, too,” Nancy said. “My writers never even let me mourn her. I had to do all my grieving between the lines.”
We looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Today should be the happiest day of my life.”
“The best days are the worst days,” she said. “Because she’s not here.”
“I thought my mother left me your book to tell me to be strong and not be sad, to carry on and get to work.”
“No, no,” Nancy said. “I know there’s not a story in the world that can take away the pain. But there is one thing books can do.”
She reached up and pulled a maple leaf off the tree, then held it over my head like an umbrella.
“Right,” I said. “They can remind you you’re not alone.”
—
“You aren’t alone.”
Nancy and I turned to see X standing under the streetlamp.
He clapped his hands. “It all makes perfect sense. You’re a fictional character, March. No wonder I despise you so much. You’re one of them. ”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “More advice? Revenge because I didn’t take the bait last time? I know everything about my mother now and it makes me admire her more.”
“No more advice,” he said. “I’m here to end you. Since you’re fictional, I can take the kid gloves off.” He pulled out his gun.
“You wouldn’t dare!” Nancy shouted, stepping between us. “I’ll get my father and the town marshal!”
“I’ve got this,” I said, placing a hand on her shoulder and moving her to the side. I stared X down. “I’m a self-aware fictional character. I can take over this story if I want. You forgot that part, didn’t you?” I asked as his big scary stupid ugly gun suddenly turned into a…
Banana.
“What?” he looked at the banana in his hand, then threw it on the ground. Not only was he planning to murder me, but he wasted perfectly good fresh produce. Fiend!
I walked slowly, menacingly toward him. It’s hard to be menacing in leggings, but I promise, I pulled it off. It helped that I also summoned a bolt of lightning, which hit the ground next to X, leaving a puff of smoke in the street.
He squealed and jerked away.
“Did you like that?” I asked. “How about this?”
A small but lethal meteor crashed into the concrete behind him, spraying him with glowing green shards.
I summoned fog. Invisible wolves growled from behind trees.
X turned a circle in his panic, then faced me, terror writ in bold letters across his face.
He pulled his silver lighter out of his pocket, but I wasn’t about to give him a chance to escape.
A giant bald eagle with the First Amendment written on his wings swooped in from the sky, snatching the lighter from his hand.
“No!” he cried out, leaping for it.
“Or how about this?” I asked, reaching behind my back. He held up his hands in terror. He knew I could pull anything out from behind my back—a knife, a ray gun, a venomous snake in a very bad mood.
“You’re a Book Witch! You’re not supposed to use violence.”
“I’m also a fictional character. And in a story, a fictional character can do anything she wants! Like…this!”
I pulled out a book from behind my back and brandished it in his face.
“Dante’s Inferno ?” he asked, then laughed. “Finally, real literature. Your taste is improving, March.”
“I’m not going to read it,” I said. “I’ve already read it.”
I tossed the book toward him, and it landed behind him on the ground, open.
With the tip of my umbrella, I shoved him backward into the book.
A whirlwind of words captured him, dragging him down into the Seventh Circle of Hell, where those who do violence against art are punished for eternity.
And as I did it, I said the three words every Book Witch in the world has wanted to say to every Burner since Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
“Go to Hell!”
Then with a sucking sound like the flushing of an industrial-strength toilet, he was gone.
I picked up the book, closed it, and locked X inside nice and tight with a spell.
Nancy stared at me, wide-eyed.
“I think you just turned my young adult series into horror,” she said.
“Oops. Sorry! I can fix it.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I liked it!”