embraces, the jubilant phone calls, once her parents and sisters and friends had told Nora over and over again how glad they were to see her and how grateful she was safe, the questions popped to the surface as vigorously as divers that have been underwater ten seconds too long.
Where were you? What happened? What were you doing all this time? Why couldn’t you at least call and let us know that you were all right? Do you know how worried we were? To Nora’s dismay, a town police officer also came to take a statement, and reporters from the local stations arrived to do their stand-ups in the front yard.
It was clear enough to everyone that Nora had been through some sort of trauma. The scars on her face and torso had not entirely disappeared. The doctor who examined her diagnosed a recent concussion and signs of exposure. She was underweight, although otherwise healthy. She could not give a clear account of her whereabouts for the past ten and a half months.
Yes, Nora told the cop, she had left the cabin for a walk, then gotten lost on the mountainside. An animal had mauled her. A bear? She couldn’t remember. She fell and broke her ankle. Some people found her, took care of her. They lived in the country. No telephone or electricity. Her stepmother examined the long-skirted dress she had been wearing and pronounced it hand-sewn.
The cop asked why she was wearing a wedding ring. No, I’m not married, Nora said. Yes, a man gave it to me, but it was sort of a joke. Then it wouldn’t come off. How did she get to New Jersey? Someone drove me, Nora said vaguely. The cop pressed her for the names of the people she’d stayed with. Nora mentioned an older woman named Mrs. Toristel, who had died a few weeks ago. A heart attack.
The cop didn’t buy much of the story, Nora could tell, but on the other hand Nora was no longer missing and insisted she had not been kidnapped, so he didn’t seem particularly motivated to investigate further. He did ask her to spell Mrs. Toristel’s name. Nora had to stop and think about the English transliteration.
“First name?”
“Margaret,” Nora ad-libbed.
Her mother flew in from Richmond, and it was almost as bizarre as traveling between worlds to see her sitting in the kitchen of the old house in New Jersey again and drinking coffee with Kathy and Nora’s father. Nora’s mother eyed the new kitchen wallpaper but said nothing about it. At dinner, everyone told Nora to eat more, she was too thin, and her father kept topping up her wineglass, although Nora was careful not to drink too much, because Kathy was watching her closely in case it was alcohol that had taken her away for so many months. Nora was also afraid of blurting out something so unbelievable that her family would take alarm. Bad enough that she’d slipped up and said how great it was to hear English again. Then she had to explain that the people who’d taken her in spoke some foreign language—no, not Spanish—a language she couldn’t recognize. They spoke a little English, too. That was how she got by.
She withdrew upstairs when she could, and everyone watched her go, their fond eyes sharp. Lying in bed in her sister Leigh’s room, exhausted but unable to sleep, she listened to the three adults talking, their voices wafting up like smoke. Her parents had never seemed to realize how easy it was for their children upstairs to hear almost every word they said downstairs.
They were talking about her, of course. Kathy was saying they could go by the hospital tomorrow to get the ring cut off. “She said she hates it but it’s stuck on her finger.”
They started discussing the ring and its possible significance. Listening to them, Nora began to see that, in a way, Raclin’s ring was useful. It answered the most questions. Nora had gotten mixed up with some man. She’d lost her head and followed him into who knows what kind of life, and now, thank God, it was over. Opinion was divided as to whether Nora had come to her senses on her own or whether the man had dropped her. They also could not agree on what sort of milieu Nora had been living in, and whether drugs or motorcycles or unorthodox religious or political beliefs had been involved.
“She said she hadn’t had pizza for a year.” Kathy, bemused. “Could it have been some kind of radical, vegan, back-to-the-land group? And she looked as though she hadn’t bathed for days.”
“I could just kill her for running off, if I wasn’t so happy to see her again. We are so blessed to have her back.” Her mother, unable to resist bringing God into it.
“Yes, it
In the other bed, Leigh rolled over and sighed noisily, as if to signal that the conversation downstairs was too inane to sleep through. “It’s so weird to think of Dad ever being married to your mom,” she announced.
“Yeah,” Nora said.
“You glad to be back or are you already regretting it?”
“It’s good. Really good.”
“How’d you get to be so thin? Was it drugs?”
“No!” Nora’s turn to flop over in annoyance. “Why is everyone so interested in my weight?”
“Well, you look anorexic.”
“I’m not that thin! No, I had to walk a long way, and I didn’t have much to eat.”
“Where were you walking to?”
“It was on the way home.”
“And you don’t have
“Not really. Somewhere in the mountains.”
Leigh grunted dubiously. After a while she said: “They didn’t find your body, so I thought there was a chance you were alive. But remains can skeletonize in a matter of weeks in warm weather—and animals scatter them—so I also figured that maybe they just missed you.”
A sizable chunk of the books on Leigh’s bookshelf were true-crime titles, Nora had noticed before the lights went out. That was new. “I’m really sorry. It must have been scary, not knowing.”
“Well, yeah. Mom and Dad freaked. Not that you can blame them.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said again. A car swooshed by outside, then another. She was going to have to get used to all this noise.
“The worst part is that they took it out on me. If I get home two minutes late, they’re ready to call the police. Hopefully they’ll ease up now since you weren’t actually murdered. So, yeah, next time you flip out and run away, be considerate and text someone, okay?”
“Okay,” Nora said.
The next morning, in the kitchen, she dropped her mug—after all those months without coffee, the caffeine was setting her nerves ablaze—and watched it break on the floor. Without even thinking about it, she started piecing the fragments together. And nothing happened. The shards did not cohere. She could not even say they refused to cohere. The mug was simply broken and remained so.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a souvenir mug,” Kathy said, noticing how stricken Nora looked. “We got it when we took the girls to Disney World.”
Later, Nora fished the pieces out of the trash and tried again. Nothing.
With each day, it was more and more as though she had never been away at all. Her mother went back to Virginia and only called twice a day. Reporters stopped calling. Her stepmother suggested that Nora see a counselor, but she was not pressing the point as hard as she could have. Nora herself could see the time was coming when she would not think twice about listening to music that came out of a box or taking an aspirin for a headache or driving along a street that was lined with signs and advertisements because pretty much everyone could read. She went so far as to let Kathy try to get the ring cut off at the emergency room, thinking that Raclin’s curse couldn’t possibly follow her to another world—although afterward she thought what a stupid chance to take, no one here would know what to do if she turned to stone.
Overall, she was readjusting nicely. Not more than a dozen times a day did she wonder what was happening back in that other world.
There was no way to calculate the time difference, of course. A few days could have passed there. Or months. But surely Aruendiel must be back at his castle. What was he doing now? Various images came to mind. Aruendiel leafing through a book in his tower study. On horseback. Wrapped in his black cape, moving with a jerky stride through snowy woods. Supping in the great hall, his gray eyes warming as he talked about magic. She could almost hear the rumble of his voice. But to whom would he be talking? And these were just recorded pictures in
