As I ran, the weight of my actions hit me with full force. In a world where Robbie grew up in Portland, thousands of miles away from me, I wouldn’t know Kieren. We were only friends because of Robbie. Without him in our lives, would we have ever even met?
I wouldn’t have gone to St. Joe’s, which I only did as a reaction to Robbie’s death. Those three years on the hill, my friendship with Lana, reading books under the cypress trees, all gone in a flash.
I might have still been lost on my first day of sophomore year. After all, the second-year classes were in a completely different part of the school than the first-year ones. So it’s possible Brady still would have helped me find my class, that I would have followed him to the train station that day and that we would have eventually become friends.
But our trip to Portland? I only went on that trip because of Robbie and my mother’s disappearance. And Brady went because Piper didn’t come back from seeing the Mystics. But with no lake portal to go into, Piper would have come back. She never would have met my brother on that timeless DW train, which he wouldn’t have been on in any event. She and Brady would have gotten back together. They’d be in Colorado by now.
My whole life transformed before my eyes like a photograph left out in the sun, fading into oblivion. Had I been completely defined by my brother’s death? Who would I be without it? Without Kieren? Games of Monopoly in Kieren’s rec room. Robbie and I breaking into the pyramid house. M&M’s swiped from a vending machine.
Kieren once said that DW demands a balance. No two versions of the same person can exist at once. A life for a life. He was willing, at one point, to sacrifice himself if it meant saving Robbie.
Was I willing too?
“You don’t belong here,” came a man’s voice behind me. I whipped around and saw George approaching from the beach. I stood, clutching the beaker in my arms like a wounded baby.
George came up and took a closer look at me, seeming to be confused. “Rain?”
I shook my head. “I’m her daughter. My name is Marina.”
George seemed to understand immediately. A profound sorrow took over his face. “Why are you here?”
I held out the beaker, delicately, like an offering in my palms. “Can you help me destroy this?”
He looked down at the beaker, nodding to himself in a knowing way, and let a silent whistle escape from between his dry lips.
“Yes,” he said at last.
“The truth is,” George began, as we sat on log stumps surrounded by a circle of lanterns, “it’s already destroying itself.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a natural process with radioactive material.” He shrugged, gesturing vaguely to the air. “The nuclei are unstable. Proteins escaping and being repelled. There’s nothing you or I can do about it, really.”
“But . . . can it still make a portal?”
“For now, it can. But eventually, as it degrades . . . no.”
“How long will it take?”
“A long time,” he said, placing the beaker gently by his feet.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
He scratched his head, letting out a deep sigh. “We dig a hole.”
George popped into his would-be cabin and emerged with two shovels, handing one to me. “Not here,” he said. “In the woods.”
It took over an hour of digging through moss-covered ground and gnarled tree roots before George considered the hole satisfactory. It was maybe ten-feet deep by then. A bone-chilling cold seeped out of the rock-hard earth that surrounded it. When George finally let his shovel fall to the ground, and indicated to me that I should do the same, I couldn’t hide my relief.
He gently lowered the beaker, wrapped in a blanket with a long rope tied around it, into the deep hole. He then threw the whole length of cord in after it, and motioned to me to pick my shovel back up. We filled the opening in silence, and George gently patted some ivy back on top of the upturned soil.
“And now?” I asked.
“Now I stay, and I watch, to be sure.”
I nodded, my body all but collapsing with exhaustion.
“You can go home now, child,” he continued.
“Home,” I repeated. The word sat like a death sentence, floating in the space between us. There was an old saying: You can’t go home again.
I started to walk towards the boathouse, but I turned back before I had gone too far. “Do you believe in heaven, George?”
He continued to stare at the ground, his eyes unwavering. “Depends on your definition of the word, I guess.”
“A place where we all see each other again.”
He nodded. “Maybe,” he conceded. “There might be a heaven and there might be a hell. But on this earth, there’s just the choices we make, and the way we live with them.”
I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what I had to do.
Leaving George sitting there by the freshly buried beaker, I walked around the back of the boathouse. The brick door was waiting there for me. I slid the coin into the slot and waited for the bricks to melt away into yellow light. And then I walked forward, back into Today.
EPILOGUE
Six months passed, and another spring was upon us. I biked to school early every morning so I could feel the cool air tickling my forehead and waking me up to each new day.
I still didn’t have my license, as I had never gotten around to taking the test again. So every day after school, Dad would take me to the abandoned field where the old grounds used to be, out by the gas station, to drive the car in loops. I had no trouble
