“Authority. They’ve been lying to us for a hundred years. But that’s not important, what’s important is this” — he took a rattling breath — “on the other side of the border there are people like us, except for one thing — they live in a reality based on an entirely different set of rules.”
Something clicked into place as soon as he said it. Glenn had heard these words before. Read them before. She could see the web pages in her head as clear as day. The “divergent models” theory, if something so ridiculous could even be called a theory, was one of the most popular on Rifter websites. Glenn’s stomach turned. How could such nonsense be coming out of her own father’s mouth?
“Dad, wait — ”
“No, listen. I never told you this because … because it’s
complicated. Your mother didn’t leave us. Not like you think. She came here from the other side of the border and she had to go back.
That’s where she is now. That’s where she’s always been! I think she intended to go for just a little while, that’s why she didn’t say anything to us, but she … well, things are different there.
— he turned to The Project — “none of that matters now. We can get her back. You and me, Glenny, we can rescue her. That’s what this project has always been about. She didn’t want to leave. She loved us more than anything and she wants to come home, but she can’t. She needs us to rescue her. And once we do, everything will be back the way it was.
Before Glenn could say anything, Dad was at The Project,
rummaging through clanking bits of metal.
“This is what I’ve been building. It finally works. This will allow us to go over to the other side but bring a bit of our reality — our rules — with us. Like … like a space suit.”
He grabbed Glenn’s arm and pushed a heavy band around her
wrist. Glenn lifted it up. It was a flat gray piece of metal with a glowing red jewel in the center.
“All we have to do is find her,” Dad said. “It won’t be easy. I know that. But once we bring her into our reality, she’ll be like she was when she was here and she’ll be able to leave with us. Then everything will be like it was. We’ll have her back, Glenn. Glenn? What are you doing?”
Glenn hissed as her fingernails scraped the skin underneath the bracelet. She ripped it off and threw it into the corner of the shed, where it landed with a crash. Icy air flooded the room as Glenn threw the bolt and opened the workshop door.
“No. Wait!”
Glenn whirled around. “There’s nothing there, Dad! Nothing!”
“Glenny — ”
“She’s not on the other side and she doesn’t need to be rescued!”
Glenn screamed. “She left because she didn’t want to be with us anymore. That’s all!”
Dad called after Glenn as she stormed out of the workshop, but she ignored him. She strode across the yard and back to the house, slamming doors all the way until she made it up to her room and shut herself inside.
The silence was awful. Glenn felt sick. She fell onto her bed and her body curled around the massive emptiness inside her. Glenn listened as her father stomped up the stairs and pounded on her door, but she didn’t move.
“Glenn?” he said, his voice shaking. She could tell he was crying.
“Glenny, please.”
Her father stood at her door for a time, his feet breaking the sliver of light beneath the door into three bars.
Glenn’s breath caught in her throat, but she said nothing. She didn’t move. After a while, there was a small sound, like a sigh, and her father’s footsteps shushed down the carpeted hall.
Glenn turned onto her back and stared at the blank ceiling.
Hopkins jumped up onto the bed and began to purr. Glenn snatched him up and pressed her fingertips into the soft white patch at his throat and then traced the angle of his face. She found the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear, the last vestige of the day they found him.
“What happened to him, Mommy?” Glenn had asked.
She was five years old and standing on their front porch.
Hopkins’s little body lay battered before her. “Was it a car?”
“No,” her mother said. “It was no car. Come on, Glenny.”
Mom wrapped Hopkins up in a towel and swept him into her
arms. After the local vet had done what he could, Glenn and her mother devoted weeks of near constant attention to nursing him back to health.
They kept his wounds clean and handfed him antibiotics and morsels of fish and chicken. Glenn held a medicine dropper over his mouth until his tongue emerged and he’d take water one drop at a time. She’d sneak down into the basement with her blanket and pillows and lie by his side, running her hand over his soft fur until he began to purr and they both fell asleep.
When he was strong enough to stand on his own, Glenn’s mom
bought him a blue ceramic food dish and placed it just beyond his bed of rumpled towels. Each night she would move the bowl a little farther away: across the room, out the door, down the hall. It broke Glenn’s heart to watch him struggle for it, but she knew he was getting stronger each time he moved away from his bed and bent his long neck to eat on his own. Finally the bowl ended up in Glenn’s room, and once he found it, he rarely left her side. He slept with his nose pressed against her cheek and his paws kneading her chest, his deep purr surrounding them like another blanket.
Once he had recovered, Glenn saw the name Gerard Manley
Hopkins printed on the spine of a book on her mother’s nightstand and liked the way it sounded in her head, musical and precise.
“You are Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she decreed, touching the tip of her finger to his small pink nose, as if she was knighting him.
It was the morning of her sixth birthday.
Ten years ago.
Glenn tried to resist what came next, but the memories had the quality of water — the harder she pushed away, the stronger they rushed back.
After Hopkins’s knighting, Mom had made Glenn’s favorite -
mushroom lasagna and garlic bread with a salad made of greens she had pulled from their garden that morning. Glenn sat across from her parents at the kitchen table, wearing a new bright yellow dress and blue sneakers that didn’t match but were her favorite that week.
Mom and Dad held hands under the table and kept up a steady chatter. Dad listened more than he talked, greedy for her mother’s every word.
Mom wore blue. It perfectly set off her ink-dark hair and pale skin, which were so like Glenn’s own.
“Daddy,” the younger Glenn said as they sat around the remains of her birthday dinner. “What did Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe do for you on your sixth birthday?”
“Well,” Dad said. “I worked in the coal mines all day — ”
“Dad!”
“- and then I was whipped soundly, given a bike, and sent to bed without supper.”
“Mom, why does Dad have to be so silly?” Glenn said in her very serious six-year-old way.
“I don’t think he can help it, dear. He’s what we adults call incorrigible.”
“What did you do on
“I had a party,” Mom said brightly. “Just like yours.”
“Mom, why don’t we ever see your mom and dad like we see
Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe?”
Mom glanced across the table at Dad. “Because they live very far away,” she said.
“Will I ever go see them?”
Her mother’s hand, spread out on the white napkin by her plate, tensed slightly, then relaxed again. “Maybe,” she said, retreating from her chair to get more salad from the kitchen. “Maybe one day.”
