Fantasy Life (30 page)

Lyssa’s opinion changed somewhat when she went inside. The walls had been repainted from the institutional white that she remembered to bright primary colors. Each schoolroom door had a window in it now, and through those windows she could see brightly decorated classrooms, crammed with tiny desks and too many students, led by a teacher who seemed impossibly young.

Surely teachers had been older when she was a little girl. Even though she knew they hadn’t been. Just like the desks hadn’t been bigger, and the water fountains hadn’t been higher.

Going back through these halls was like walking through a memory that someone had shrunk down to size.

Near all the water fountains, placed at child’s-eye level, were signs that Lyssa had never seen before.
Tsunami Evacuation Route,
the signs announced in big red letters, and Lyssa paused long enough to examine one.

Anchor Bay Elementary was on prime real estate across from the bay itself. The school had survived some serious storms in the 1960s and early 1970s, storms that had damaged windows and, in one case, nearly destroyed the building.

But when Lyssa had attended, there hadn’t been evacuation signs. She hadn’t even known there was serious tsunami danger here. As she read, she learned that a fault line ran the length of the Oregon Coast, two miles offshore. Should an earthquake hit that fault, residents who lived on the flats—or who happened to be in the elementary school—would have less than ten minutes to get to the highest ground.

The highest ground near Anchor Bay Elementary was a hill several blocks away, certainly not something that little children could reach easily or quickly.

She would talk to her grandmother about this when she
got home, to see if it was a real threat or more CYA warnings from a school system that had to worry about an increasingly litigious group of parents.

The signs made her nervous, but nothing bothered her more than walking deeper inside the school, with all of its memories.

It didn’t take her long to find the principal’s office. No one had moved it. She had spent many days in that office, usually sitting on a bright orange plastic chair, kicking her saddle-shoe-clad feet.

She had been an angry child from the start, one Principal Gower had said would never succeed at anything. He had died of a heart attack when she was in high school, so she couldn’t go back and prove him wrong, although she often wanted to.

And now, it seemed, his predictions might have been right.

Her cheeks were flushed, and that was partly due to the heat in the building. The elementary school Emily had attended in Madison had also seemed too warm, as if the schools were determined to keep the children comfortable even though they could no longer afford to educate them.

Initially, Lyssa had thought of homeschooling Emily. Homeschooling was legal in Oregon, and Lyssa was eminently qualified to teach her child, surpassing all the requirements mentioned on the Oregon homeschooling Web site.

But that attack at Cliffside House had unnerved her more than she wanted to admit, and she had decided that Emily needed outside contact. Outside contact was possible now that Cassie had started Emily’s lessons. With luck, Emily would have at least minimal control of her powers by the time she started mingling with the other students.

The principal’s office was no brighter or cheerier than it had been when Lyssa had been a little girl. In fact, the only real difference that she could see was the computer on the secretary’s desk. The secretary herself could have been the daughter of the draconian woman who had guarded Lyssa: she had the
same short hairstyle, the same John Lennon granny glasses, and even wore the same sort of shapeless knit dress that had passed for fashion when Lyssa was a child.

Of course, that fashion had become fashionable again, which was part of the reason for Lyssa’s flashback, but not all of it. Just the air in that high-ceilinged room, with its slow-moving ceiling fan, made her stomach tighten.

Registering Emily, though, wasn’t hard. The secretary had smiled when she’d seen Lyssa and said, “You must be Athena’s granddaughter. She called us this morning and said you’d be in.”

The secretary had all the paperwork ready, the information typed into the proper sections—all obviously the work of Athena. All Lyssa had to do was sign and promise that Emily would be at her seat in her new classroom promptly at 9
A.M
. on Monday.

The 9
A.M
. starting time amused Lyssa. She had forgotten how lax things were at the coast. Early morning meant 8
A.M.,
because most shops opened at ten. Only the merchants kept regular hours. Everyone else—from the fishermen to the hotel employees—worked various shifts, from before dawn to long past midnight.

Lyssa would have to get out of the rhythms of a city whose livelihood had three bases—government, corporations, and the university—and back into a blue-collar world of split shifts and hand-to-mouth income.

Lyssa signed, promised, and found herself out the door before she even realized she was done. She took the back exit, which was closer to the parking lot, an exit she had forgotten existed. When she had come in, she had used the front, just like she had for six long years as a little girl.

The parking lot was nestled in a group of pines, old ones with thick, knotted trunks and out-of-control branches. Dozens of cars were parked near the trees—mostly teachers’ vehicles—and the visitor parking was closer to the building itself.

From the parking lot, she had a great view of Anchor Harbor Wayside with its steel railing and modern rest area. The ocean still dominated the scene, however. It still had that bright blue, unthreatening look, and it seemed deceptively calm.

But something made her shiver as she looked at it, and she couldn’t forget the taste of that tar ball in her mouth.

She walked to the Bug, unlocked it, and let herself inside. Then she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Part of her was tempted to just drive away—to leave Emily in the very competent hands of Athena and Cassie—and just keep driving until she reached Canada. From there, Lyssa could disappear into the wilderness, become someone new, someone who hadn’t married badly, didn’t have a screwed-up family history, and wasn’t threatened by ghostly tar balls on her first day home in more than a decade.

That last made her smile and shake her head. No matter where she went, no matter what name she called herself by, she would still be a woman who had married badly and had a screwed-up family history.

More importantly, she would still be a mother. Only she would be one who had abandoned a child who was already traumatized, abandoned her to people who didn’t know her well at all, people who believed things that, on good days, Lyssa liked to pretend never happened.

She had no idea how long she sat there, wishing she could run away. But even the daydream wasn’t satisfying. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she left, wouldn’t be able to face any part of her life.

And she still had a lot of facing to do. Not only did she have to find a place for Emily in this tiny town, but she also had to find a place for herself. What did a professor do in a town that didn’t have a college? The nearest college was in the valley, over the mountains and at least an hour away.

There was no guarantee she would get work there.
Knowing how tight jobs were in Oregon, she probably wouldn’t.

Not that she was suited to anything else. She hadn’t waited tables since high school, and in her early years, she had gone to college on a hardship scholarship her mother had found. Once Lyssa had married Reginald, his family money had paid for her education.

She had a Ph.D. courtesy of a family her own hated.

Lyssa sighed. She would probably end up like her mother, working in various retail shops and playing at tourist scams. Not that she had her mother’s psychic ability or talent, but Lyssa could charm. At least she could make people feel that they had gotten their money’s worth, even if they hadn’t.

A flock of geese was passing nearby. Lyssa hadn’t heard that combination of honking and gabbling since she had left the coast. Most of the places she had lived hadn’t been quiet enough to hear birds regularly, particularly those heading south for the winter.

Although it seemed a bit late to her for birds to go south, but what did she know? She knew about the military history of Prussia, but she didn’t know anything really useful.

The bleating grew louder, as if the flock was flying east instead of south. Then something hit her car, rocking it.

She opened her eyes and turned. Creatures, tiny and round, scrambled toward her on stubby little legs. Several were already climbing over her car.

But they didn’t seem to be paying attention to her. She doubted they even saw her. They were running due east, as fast as their little legs could carry them.

And the line of them extended all the way to the ocean.

Her heart was pounding, hard. She’d never seen so many unknown creatures up close. There had to be twenty on her car alone, hurrying past, fear on their round faces.

They looked like miniature gnomes, with pudgy cheeks and sparkling eyes. Their hair was white and flowed behind them,
and they appeared to be wearing clothing made of seaweed.

But they didn’t have hands or feet. Instead, they had flat, flipperlike substances with suckers on the end. They were using the suckers to pull themselves up the side of her car, and to keep balanced once they reached the domed back end.

They chattered as they ran, nonsense syllables, frightening in their variation. Sometimes they would stop to help another up or down, and they would keep running.

A few looked over their shoulder when they got to the top of the car, as if they expected something else to come after them.

Lyssa watched, her mouth open, afraid to move. She didn’t dare back up for fear of squashing the little things. She didn’t want to get out of the car either. Even though the creatures were tiny, there were hundreds of them, and if they had something against humans as so many of her grandmother’s fantastic friends seemed to, she would be inviting them to hurt her.

No matter how small something was, in vast numbers any kind of creature was dangerous.

So Lyssa slowly, quietly, locked the car doors and made sure the windows were rolled up tight. Then she remained motionless in the driver’s seat, waiting for the stream of creatures from the ocean to end.

The Trawler Restaurant
Anchor Bay. Oregon

The woman standing in the restaurant doorway looked eerily familiar.

Cassie stiffened, but Emily didn’t seem to notice. She had
her face buried in the adult menu, the children’s menu left carefully hanging off the end of the table, making it clear to anyone and everyone that she felt she didn’t deserve cutely named peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches or tiny crab cakes, baked in the shape of a shell.

The woman was barely five feet tall, with hair as long as Cassie’s, but so black that in the restaurant’s fluorescent light it looked blue. She was young—or at least, she seemed young—with flawless white skin, and wide, oval-shaped, black eyes.

It was the way she held herself, as if her balance were slightly off, the vaguely flat-footed way she walked—what a former ballerina friend of Cassie’s once called “duck feet”—and the rigid posture as if she monitored each and every one of her movements, to make sure it blended in with everyone else’s.

She looked around the restaurant, and Cassie kept very still, knowing that the woman was looking for her.

Cassie didn’t want to be found, especially with Emily.

Cassie had brought Emily to the Trawler, an old family restaurant on the north side of the bay, because they weren’t getting anywhere on the beach. Emily refused to go near the water and, after that little demonstration of how their powers worked together, did not want to practice any magic at all.

Emily said she was hungry and wanted to go back to Cliffside House, but that dark and gloomy place was the last thing Emily needed on this sunny afternoon. Instead, Cassie brought her to the Trawler, hoping it would cheer her up.

The Trawler was a rarity—a tourist attraction with excellent food. But locals only went to the restaurant in the fall and winter, when the pace was leisurely and the portions generous.

Emily had chosen a bench in the back, with no view of the ocean at all. The waiter had teased her about that; people came to the Trawler for its magnificent view of the harbor and the open water beyond.

Emily sat with her back to the gift shop and what small
view of the ocean was possible from this table. She had a perfect view of the kitchen and, until the waiter had arrived with their drinks and menus, had watched with great interest as the cooks made lunch for the only other couple in the place.

Still, she seemed to be enjoying herself. The restaurant was light and airy. It smelled of fried foods and fish, not unwelcome scents after the morning on the beach.

Like most restaurants on the coast, the Trawler was decorated with a sea motif, but this one wasn’t overpowering. Real Japanese floats, found over decades in the waters of the Pacific, hung from hand-knotted fishing nets attached to the ceiling.

The tables were plank wood, and instead of chairs, there were benches on either side. The center of the tables held condiments and old-fashioned napkin holders, as well as a tiny pail complete with a tiny shovel that could be purchased if the patrons wanted to go outside and dig in the sand.

Cassie had never seen anyone buy a bucket, but she had seen many a tourist stop in the small gift-shop area near the cash register and buy overpriced earrings, postcards, and seashell sculptures. She never had completely understood the attraction of junk, but then, she never had liked possessions much.

Emily was still studying her menu when the strange woman entered the restaurant. Cassie had long since given up on hers. She knew what she was going to order—she had since she had come in here. The Trawler had the freshest halibut in Anchor Bay, and they poached it lightly, making the fish seem as if it had been cooked just enough to bake in the flavor. With their steamed broccoli and rice pilaf, a recipe that Cassie loved and couldn’t get out of them, the Trawler had created a perfect fish meal.