But for a moment, as her siblings flew on ahead, Susan paused. It wouldn’t be quite the same, she thought. Theirs was a world of walls, but doors could be made. And windows.
She turned back and touched the window, wondering. It was hard again, and cold. On the other side, Mrs. Grady’s kitchen light filtered out, through her colored glass, into the deepening blue.
But it wasn’t so easy to go home, after all.
They had been gone more than two months or a moment, depending on which side of the window you stood on. And it was strange, stepping back that way into life. When they’d been home four days, the children met, as they had daily, in the school yard at recess. Before their trip through the window, school had been a time to separate, and Nell in particular had not liked to acknowledge that she had younger sisters. But it was different now. Now they sat together in their winter coats on the bench at the side of the yard, watching the others from a distance. Beside them a pile of discarded parkas made a small dark hill where the fourth-graders had dropped them when they’d begun playing tag. To their right, some girls from Kate’s class jumped rope, chanting a jumble of rhymes and numbers that came out in little puffs of vapor in the cold air. And far to the left, in the field that connected the elementary and middle schools, Max’s friends played kickball. After three days, they’d given up asking if he wanted to play.
Susan sighed and rubbed the end of her cold nose. “It’s not the same,” she said. “It all seems so — I don’t know. Small. Was it that way before, do you think? And I’m forgetting?”
At a nearby bench, Lucy Driscoll held court before an audience of younger children, doing a dramatic reading. She was dressed in a nylon coat so puffy it sounded like someone crumpling paper each time she moved. She looked up pointedly at Susan and flounced over to the bench. Crumple. Crumple. Crumple.
“You can stop moping,” she said, folding her arms to the tune of newspapers being mashed. “I’ve had enough of your sitting here like someone’s done something to you. And you and your little posse can stop spying on me, too, because it won’t do you a bit of good!”
Nell squinted at her. “New coat, Lucy?”
Lucy ignored her, trying to pin Susan with her eyes.
Susan just looked back at her, puzzled. “What are you talking about, Lucy? Nobody was even looking at you.”
The other girl raised an eyebrow. “Oh, weren’t you? All of you five getting together now for four days just to talk? I know you’re watching me practice, hoping I’ll mess up! Don’t try to deny it!”
Nell cocked her head. “You’re practicing for what, again?”
Lucy looked mortally offended.
“My part in the play, of course!”
“Oh!” Susan said, her face clearing. “I’d forgotten all about that!”
Lucy turned red, pressed her lips together, and stalked off, crushing paper all the way. The children watched her go.
“That part. I could care less about it now,” Susan said. “It all seems so long ago, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does,” Max said. “I can’t get my head around the time change. No time here, and so much there. I’ve got to figure out how that worked.”
Susan’s eyes swept across the school yard again. “Doesn’t it bother you, though? I’m happy to be home — you know I am — but it just seems so — I don’t know — limited. Filled with Lucy Driscolls, I mean.”
Max shrugged. He was sitting on the back of the bench, teetering there, and enjoying the crisp air.
“It’s not, though,” he said, looking up into the winter sky. “She’s silly, but the world in general’s not. There’s plenty going on! After science today, Mr. Shire showed me a list of the greatest new inventions and discoveries of the decade. Did you know they’ve got windmills that can fly now, to get energy from the jet stream? And they’ve found a sugar molecule that might have started life on Earth! People are inventing new things all the time! It’s huge!”
“He’s right,” Nell said. “It’s different here, but that doesn’t make it smaller.”
Max got up. “You know, we were kind of moping.”
He ran off to join the kickball game. Jean was right behind him, making a beeline for her friends near the jungle gym.
Nell shook her head. “It’s no use wanting to go back, Susan. We’d only be missing home again, like we did before. It’s one or the other, and if I have to choose, I choose home.” She, too, trotted away to join her friends.
Susan said nothing for a minute. She glanced at Kate, who sat swinging her legs and thinking.
“What do you say, Kate? Do you miss it?”
“A little,” she said. “But I missed home, too. Nell’s right.”
“Even school?” Susan asked. “Did you miss that?”
Kate laughed. “Not that, no.”
They watched Lucy Driscoll another moment, pondering. From near the jungle gym, some of Kate’s friends ran up, calling to Kate to join them in a game of soccer.
“Go on,” Susan said when she saw Kate hesitate.
“You should go, too, Susan.”
“I will,” Susan told her. “In a bit.”
Kate went off, and Susan sat another second, letting her eyes sweep across the school yard. Max had it right — the world was big. She didn’t want to see it the way Lucy Driscoll did, thinking this was all of it. She got up and went to find her friends.
And so it ended, in its way.
But Susan would say that once told, a story is never really ended.
Jean asked her about it for a long time after they returned, when blue window time came around each night. She wanted to know if the window, of its own accord, would ever open again.
Listening, Nell reminded her that a
