Fantasy Life (29 page)

Emily wanted to sleep in the window seat—right there, with a few of the ocean and the clouds like she’d never seen them, and a bit of a moon peeking through—but Mommy wouldn’t let her. In fact, Mommy seemed upset by the whole idea of Emily sleeping at the house at all. Mommy would have loved to go to a hotel, even though that would’ve been worse.

The house was perfect. Emily loved her room and the windows and the slightly damp smell that seemed to be everywhere. She liked the black walls, the way they felt so cool and smooth, and that the house whispered to her—not in words, but in ways that made her calmer than she had been for a long time.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like she was safe. Long before Daddy died. Even before she and Mommy moved out of the house. That house, which Emily had grown up in, didn’t seem like her house anymore at all. It had a strange, scary feel, like it was going to explode at any minute.

And then she went back there, and everything did explode.

She wrapped her arms tighter around her legs. Grandma Cassie was trudging up the beach, like it was work for her to dig her feet in the sand.

Emily had never really realized how skinny Grandma Cassie was. She was like a straight line, her hair gathering around her like a dress. Even when she tied it back, it still was the most obvious thing about her.

Daddy would have liked her hair. He liked long hair.

Emily’s hair wasn’t ever going to be long again.

“What happened, kiddo?” Grandma Cassie asked as she reached Emily.

Emily shrugged. “Nothing.”

Grandma Cassie sat beside her. “Everything’s different, huh? Strange city, strange house. Your whole world is different.”

Different than what?
Emily wanted to ask, but she knew better than to smart-off to grown-ups. Her world had been different for a long time now. She could barely remember normal.

In fact, she was putting normal behind her. Because of normal, she had biked to Daddy’s. Because of normal, Daddy was dead.

“Has your mom ever talked to you about your powers?” Grandma Cassie asked.

What happened, hon?
Mom had asked over and over again.
Did you get a funny feeling when you were near Daddy? Did he do something that made you mad, maybe?

“No,” Emily said.

Grandma Cassie bit her lower lip and nodded, as if she had expected that.

“I already know you got powers,” Emily said, “and can read minds and stuff. And you said Great-grandma has powers too. How come Mommy doesn’t?”

“She has some,” Grandma Cassie said. “She just hasn’t shared them with anyone else.”

Whatever that meant. Grandma Cassie liked saying things
sideways. So did everybody else. Grown-ups always pretended to answer questions, but they usually didn’t. They just said words, like words were an answer, and the words mostly didn’t mean anything.

“Mommy says you know the future,” Emily said.

“Sometimes,” Grandma Cassie said.

Emily rested her chin on her knees. She stared at the beach grass. The blades came up through the sand, like they were trying to reach the sky and the sand was trying to stop them.

“Did you know my daddy was going to die?” Emily asked.

Grandma Cassie turned toward her, and Emily knew somehow that Grandma Cassie wanted Emily to look at her. But Emily wasn’t going to. She didn’t want to look at anybody. She didn’t want Grandma Cassie to read her mind and give her a fake answer.

She wanted the real answer.

“I knew your mom’s marriage to your dad couldn’t end well,” Grandma Cassie said after a long silence.

“How come?” Emily asked. “Because you didn’t like my daddy’s daddy?”

Grandma Cassie picked a blade of beach grass and ran it between her fingers, like she was trying to smooth it out.

“It’s an old cliché, honey, about oil and water.”

Emily even knew that one. “So what?”

“Your mother is the water, honey. Your daddy came from oil.”

“That’s just where they lived when they were little. Daddy was a teacher, just like Mommy, before—you know. Before.”

Emily didn’t want to say anything about her father’s death. She didn’t like thinking about it, even though she thought about it all the time.

“When people come from backgrounds that different—”

“I don’t care!” Emily was surprised to hear herself yelling.
She didn’t expect to yell, especially at her own grandma. She loved Grandma Cassie. She didn’t want to be mad at her.

But she was. She was really, really mad. About everything.

“You knew that if they got married, my daddy would die.” Emily had turned toward Grandma Cassie, and unlike most people when Emily got mad at them, Grandma Cassie didn’t back away. “How come you didn’t tell Mommy? How come you didn’t stop it?”

Grandma Cassie reached toward Emily with the hand holding the beach grass. Grandma Cassie brushed some hair away from Emily’s eyes, and the beach grass skimmed her skin. She caught the smell of green, and it smelled like Wisconsin, like what she used to think of as home.

But the old smell didn’t make her feel much better. She didn’t feel like yelling anymore, but she was shaking. She hadn’t realized how upset she really was until now. Until right now on this beach, with Grandma Cassie next to her.

“I didn’t stop it,” Grandma Cassie said quietly, “because of you.”

“Me?” Emily frowned. She didn’t get that. “I wasn’t even born yet.”

“I know. That was the problem. We needed you in the world, and the only way we could get you was if your mommy married your daddy.”

“And then I killed him.” The words hung in the air like words in a cartoon. Emily could almost see them, and they kept echoing, rolling over and over again with the surf.

She hadn’t wanted to say that. She had never really said it to anybody before, and Mommy would’ve been mad about it.

Your daddy was sick,
Mommy said,
whatever happens, remember that. Your daddy was sick, and because he was, you went through something awful. Because of him.

“You killed-him?” Grandma Cassie smoothed another strand of hair away from Emily’s face. Grandma Cassie didn’t
sound shocked or mad. She just sounded like they were talking about normal stuff, like socks or classes at school. “You really think so?”

Emily couldn’t answer that question. The words that had come out so easily a moment before wouldn’t come now.

Instead, she nodded.

“Can I see?” Grandma Cassie asked.

“See?”

“What happened. Will you let me see it?”

“How?” Emily asked.

“I’ll show you.” Grandma Cassie put both hands on Emily’s face. The blade of beach grass got caught in the wind and fluttered away.

Grandma Cassie’s hands were warm and dry. They smelled of grass and coffee. Emily wanted to lean her whole body against Grandma Cassie’s, but she didn’t. She didn’t move at all.

“If you don’t want to do this,” Grandma Cassie said, “all you have to do is say stop.”

Stop,
Emily wanted to whisper. But she didn’t. Instead, she closed her eyes.

“No, sweetie. We can’t do this if your eyes are closed.” Grandma Cassie sounded real calm, as if this was all normal for her. It was weird to think of this magic stuff as normal, weird to think all that had happened since July as stuff other people go through all the time.

Emily had to struggle to open her eyes. Grandma Cassie smiled at her.

“Ready?”

“Yes,” Emily whispered.
Stop.

But Grandma Cassie didn’t stop. “Just think of the last time you saw your daddy.”

Emily did, then tried to stop herself, but it didn’t help. That feeling came back—maybe it never went away—that scared
feeling, that feeling that everything had gotten even worse, that sinking feeling that happened the minute she understood that everybody who told her not to see Daddy, that Daddy was dangerous, everybody who said that was right, and Emily was the one who was wrong.

Then her memory slipped out her eyes—she felt it leave, like a gust of wind on her eyeballs, only the wind came from the inside—and then, on the grass, she saw herself and Daddy on the dock.

The dock and the lake and Daddy and her other self, they were all really tiny, smaller than Barbie, almost action-figure size. And she could hear everything, just like she was watching a tiny movie, only she couldn’t feel it, not like she did when it replayed in her head.

She talked to him, and he talked to her, his voice sounding just like Daddy’s, only tiny, like the sound turned down, and then he smiled that weird smile and reached for her, and with one move, she was in the water.

And she wanted to close her eyes, but Grandma said she couldn’t, so she watched as Daddy’s smile got weirder, as he leaned his whole body over the side of the dock, putting all his weight on her shoulders, and as she watched, she remembered how that felt, how her hands were reaching for his arms, and how she fought, and how she knew she wasn’t going to be able to hold her breath any longer, and how scared she was—

Then there were flames on Daddy’s chest and he was slapping himself and screaming and screaming and screaming. She had heard the screaming underwater, but it was nothing like this. Even with the sound turned down, it was awful, and her eyes teared up, and the little people below her wavered, like they were underwater.

Daddy kept screaming and Emily couldn’t take it any more. She closed her eyes, and the tears fell down her cheeks. Grandma Cassie kissed her forehead, but Emily jerked away
and buried her face in her knees, trying to pretend that nothing was wrong.

But her breath hitched and she made little noises, no matter how hard she tried to keep quiet, and Grandma Cassie put her arms around her and said, “Let it out, Emily. Let it out.”

Emily didn’t know what that meant, but she did know she couldn’t stop, and Grandma’s arms felt good, and she was surprisingly soft for somebody so skinny, and she smelled like lotion and seawater, and that made things all better.

Grandma Cassie wasn’t mad at her and didn’t push her away, and she saw the whole thing, even though she didn’t know—she couldn’t know—that it was the fire inside of Emily that Emily had pushed away, and that had started a fire inside of Daddy. And because he didn’t have the magic that Buckinghams had, because he was oil, not water, he burned better.

That last thought wasn’t hers.

Emily sat up, her breath still hitching, and looked at Grandma’s face. It was filled with love.

“See?” Emily said, her voice husky. “I killed him.”

“Emily,” Grandma Cassie said, “he was trying to kill you.”

“No! No, he wasn’t. He was my daddy. He loved me.”

“He did love you, when his mind worked right. But his mind had stopped working, honey. You did what you had to.”

“I didn’t have to kill him.”

“You had no other choice.”

“What if the fire got his hands?”

“The same thing would have happened,” Grandma Cassie said. “Besides, that would have taken control, and since you had no idea how magical you were, you had no control.”

Emily wiped at her face. It was wrong. It wasn’t fair. Her daddy loved her, and then this happened, and it was all her fault.

“A lot of things went wrong that afternoon,” Grandma Cassie said. “Your daddy tried to hurt you.”

Emily set her jaw and stared at the spot in the beach grass where the little figures had been. The sand wasn’t even stirred up.

“Then he put you in water. What he didn’t know—or maybe some part of him did—was that water makes you stronger.”

Emily frowned.

Grandma Cassie put a hand on Emily’s knee. “Water amplifies your abilities, which is why you feel safest around water.”

“I don’t feel safe in the water. I hate water.”

“Now. After you’d been traumatized. But it wasn’t the water’s fault.”

“It was my fault.”

“No, honey,” Grandma Cassie said. “Your daddy said some interesting things. The heat, the drought, and the dying lake. Was that lake really dying?”

Emily shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You can tell, honey. The water should have receded so that you would see the lake bottom. There would be way too much algae, and everyone would be talking about how all the fish die.”

Emily frowned, trying to remember. “They talked about the heat.”

“But not the lake?”

“Nobody said stuff about the lake. And I never saw the bottom. It looked the same to me.”

“It looked the same to me too, only smaller.” Grandma Cassie smiled a little as she nodded toward the place where the image had been. “Then, after he said that, your daddy said you’d solve it together. Do you know what he meant?”

Emily shook her head really slow. She didn’t remember anything her daddy said, except she had to, because she had showed it to her grandma.

“Interesting,” Grandma Cassie said, like she was talking to herself. “I have some work to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“Research.”

Emily licked her lips. The breeze had come up and it was chilly, just like everything else.

“Grandma?”

Grandma Cassie took a moment to look at Emily, as if she were thinking about something else. “What, honey?”

“Did I make that picture of me and Daddy or did you?”

“We both did, sweetheart. We couldn’t do that without each other.”

“But could you do that with, like, maybe, Mommy or that man who helped us get here last night?”

Grandma Cassie shook her head. “No. Our powers mesh, yours and mine. That’s how we did that.”

“How did you know they’d mesh?”

Grandma Cassie looked down, and Emily knew she was going to get a grown-up answer, not a real answer.

“I just knew, honey,” Grandma Cassie said. “I knew it all along.”

Anchor Bay Elementary School

Anchor Bay Elementary looked no different from what it had when Lyssa was a child. It was two stories high, and a block long, made of some type of dark brick, and it looked forebidding. Even the hand-drawn pictures in the windows (which looked much like the hand-drawn pictures from the mid-1970s) didn’t mitigate the school’s gloomy appearance.

The school had been designed and built in the days when education was Good for You, like eating badly cooked peas or
taking foul-tasting medicine. Even now, when school (and everything else in American life) was supposed to be fun, it looked as if Anchor Bay Elementary hadn’t gotten the message.