Up on the Rooftop (6 page)

He caught it and his hands immediately disappeared. Hers didn’t when she held the dang thing, but Delbert’s did. Of course, someone who didn’t even believe in magic probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

She extended her hand to Marshall. “Come with me.”

He looked at her cautiously, that what’s-she-going-to-do-now look in his eye, the one that people got when she misbehaved. He hadn’t used that on her before.

She had to change the look by no longer earning it.

“Please,” she said.

He glanced at Delbert, blinked, and frowned. Marshall had clearly seen the missing hands. In fact, Delbert was holding the shield in front of his legs, so from the waist down, a circle of him had disappeared, leaving only the outside of his thighs, his ankles and his shoes visible.

No one could miss that. She wasn’t sure how anyone could justify it to themselves, but no one could miss it.

She extended her hand just a little farther. Marshall eyed it like it might bite him, when before he had clearly enjoyed touching her.

She held her breath.

He stepped forward and took her hand firmly in his own. “All right,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

10

HE DIDN’T KNOW what he expected—maybe that she would lead him to his truck or to the vehicle she had stolen (because if she had escaped from an institution, she couldn’t have one of her own, right?). The one thing he did know was this: He hadn’t expected her to lead him through the hole in the snow.

She dragged him around Delbert, and she walked into the hole. Marshall followed.

The first thing that he noticed was that the hole was a Delbert-sized hole, and that the footprints—heading toward his driveway—were Delbert-sized footprints. But they were the only pair of prints. Marshall saw no sign of Julka’s dainty prints, the ones she was now leaving on the way to—what? He couldn’t tell. But he did see some flat deep marks in the snow, marks that looked like they were made by giant skis.

He felt a shiver run down his back that had nothing to do with the cold. Was someone playing a prank on him? Was this a trick to get the terrible investment banker out of the neighborhood? And if so, why do it now? Why not wait until Christmas?

He was feeling paranoid. Heck, no. He
was
paranoid. But he had to admit, if only to himself, that this afternoon—ever since he had seen Julka in Burger King (if not before) was extremely strange.

Still, it would be impossible to do such a thing in this storm, on the eve of Halloween.

He didn’t say anything. He let her pull him to the marks in the snow. Of course, he did. And he felt really sad. Because he had liked her more than he had liked any woman he ever met, more than he had liked
anyone
he had ever met. He had found her intriguing and beautiful in her non-elfish way, and just odd enough to make her interesting to him.

And he had sacrificed that for her, so she could have a good trip here, thinking the memory would be enough for him. Then she had shown up here at his house, and he actually had hope for something more, something that would be—he didn’t know, more than coffee, surely, more than a simple afternoon talking.

He only knew that he could have gazed in her eyes forever.

He reached her side only a second later. He wondered where the joke would go now.

Then she reached up and mimed opening a door.

11

THE SMELL OF PEPPERMINT and spoiled veal wafted out of the sleigh, so strong that it made Julka choke. She hadn’t realized just how filthy the interior of the sleigh had gotten.

But, she was going to get in trouble
anyway
, so she was in all the way. She was taking this risk.

Even if no one else wanted her to.

Marshall no longer looked at her like she was crazy. Now he looked at her with that sadness he’d had at the Burger King. The sadness he’d had when they talked about his life. And that made her feel even worse.

“Come with me,” she said one more time, and climbed the flight of invisible steps into the sleigh.

12

HE STILL HELD HER HAND. His hand rose up as she climbed a set of steps he couldn’t see.

He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t see them; he just knew that he couldn’t. Usually he could see clear plastic or whatever it was that made the steps impossible to see against that backdrop of new fallen snow. But his eyes were really off this afternoon.

He couldn’t see a thing.

Half of Julka seemed to disappear into the air. But he was holding her hand, so he knew this wasn’t some optical illusion.

He felt around with the toe of his boot until he found the invisible stair, then he put the bottom of his boot on it and slid his foot forward. The toe hit the next stair, but it still looked to him like he was standing on nothing.

The illusion made him oddly uncomfortable.

The smell of peppermint mixed with rotting garbage made his stomach turn. When he reached the top of the third step, he could see Julka, standing inside a—what? He didn’t have the word for it. The interior of a small RV? If it was an RV, it was a 1950s Christmas-themed RV crossed with a 1950s version of a spacecraft or an airplane cockpit.

He felt dizzy, and he realized he was holding his breath.

It was that stench.

Then he leaned back out of the door, and peered at the exterior.

There was no exterior. Only a blank spot where there should’ve been a view of the hedgerow between his property and the neighbor’s, and the curve in the road, and from this vantage, the tip of another neighbor’s house.

“Come on,” she said for the third time.

Third time’s the charm
, his mom always used to say. He wondered what she would think now. His mom hadn’t had a lot of imagination. She didn’t even understand imaginary numbers, which made his mathematics brain hurt. A mathematician
needed
imagination, and his mom (face it, his parents) had none.

Although they had been proud of him. Investment banker, venture capitalist. They hadn’t lived to see the collapse, didn’t know about his loss of reputation, had no idea how lonely he would become.

They had always imagined him with a family—his father had said as much before the cancer took him—and that was their only disappointment. They had passed on before seeing grandchildren.

Or seeing their son lapse into complete insanity.

He stepped inside.

And immediately hit his head on the top of the door. The pain sent a shiver through him. He grabbed his forehead with his free hand. The door’s opening had to be really low for him to hit his head because he was not quite six feet tall. And everything in America was built to accommodate a six-foot tall man.

But Julka had an accent, and she had made it clear she wasn’t from here.

She was from up north. And she had looked a bit confused when he mentioned Canada, so maybe it wasn’t that up north, but a different up north.

And she was wearing a red Santa/elf costume.

His stomach twisted—and not from the smell. Oddly enough, he was getting used to that. His stomach twisted because he was getting suspicious.

He didn’t like what he was thinking.

He hadn’t thought about impossible things since he got his doctorate, when he realized that impossible imaginings and mathematical theories weren’t practical enough to help him survive in the real world. He’d moved to statistical analysis and mathematical systems and economics, and had made a fortune, but had screwed up his life.

So, for a moment anyway, he was going to settle on one impossible thing: A pretty non-elf woman in a Christmas costume on the day before Halloween, standing inside an invisible RV decorated like Santa’s 1950 Christmas nightmare.

Marshall stood up slowly so that he didn’t hit his head on the rounded ceiling. It looked like the ceiling in a camper, not the ceiling in an RV. Modern RVs, they looked like small houses. There was nothing house-like about this place. It was crammed with stuff, including some filthy t-shirts that had crude sayings on them, often with drawings. They, like everything else he’d seen so far, were Delbert-sized.

In one corner, there was a shelf covered with dainty things. That had to belong to Julka.

Marshall moved in a slow circle, taking it all in. Could this be an hallucination? Those usually didn’t come with touch and stink. An illusion? Again, those were usually aimed at the eye, not the other senses. And he was wrong about the stink. It didn’t just use up one sense. It imposed on two. He could taste that rot. Peppermint would never be a happy fragrance for him again.

Julka just watched him, looking a little tense.

“Okay,” he said after a moment. “My first response is that you gotta explain this.”

She opened her mouth, but he held up his hand so that she couldn’t speak.

“My second response is that you don’t dare explain this.” His heart was pounding. “Because if you explain it, then I’m going to have to think about it, and if I think about it, then I’m going to have accept some things that I’m not willing to accept—or, at least, something that I haven’t accepted for oh, twenty-some years.”

Her mouth closed, and she tilted her head, looking both bemused and worried.

“Not,” he said, “that I’m close-minded or anything. It’s just that I’m—oh, God—not willing to change cherished beliefs, which makes me close-minded, I guess, or maybe just adult, because if I take this at face value, then that means Santa is real, and if Santa is real, then all of those science courses I took, all of those courses that I
believed
in, they would be wrong.”

Julka raised a finger, as if she were going to say something. And he really should let her talk, but he couldn’t stop babbling, because if he stopped, then she would tell him what he was seeing, and that would be a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

“And if the science courses are wrong, well, that’s less serious than the math courses being wrong, because I
believe
in math, and it is a mathematical impossibility for one man to circle the globe in 24 hours
and
drop off the right toys at the right house without anyone seeing him. Just on the time factor alone. There aren’t enough minutes in the day. There just aren’t. And that’s for the flying and the landing. That’s not really counting the time it would take to squeeze down a chimney.”

Then his breath caught. He first saw her on
rooftops.
Looking at chimneys. He’d seen her
kick
a chimney.

But he couldn’t think about that right now. So he kept talking. Because if he let her talk, then she might say something sensible. (How could there be anything sensible about this?) And he would have to listen, and if he listened, then—

“Maybe I can deal with the loss of science,” he said, “but the loss of math—well, that’s like the final straw. Because I devoted my life to math. Until this moment, I
understood
math. I have always understood math. That’s why I retired when I couldn’t convince the guys in my office that the way they were floating on one of those proverbial mathematical bubbles and those things didn’t last, but if this is all true, well then, this bubble has lasted, and everything,
everything,
I know is wrong, and I really really really can’t face that. Not right now.”

Julka’s shoulders drooped. He had disappointed her. Worse, he had hurt her somehow. He wasn’t sure how, but he had.

“It’s not about math,” she started.

“Of course it’s about math.” He sounded even more panicked than he felt. He sounded terrified and wobbly and slightly off-the-beam. Maybe more than slightly off-the-beam. “Don’t you understand? That’s how I knew Santa wasn’t real. I did the damn math.”

“I understand math,” Julka said, moving her hands just a little in a “calm down” gesture. Now she was treating him as if he was the one who was crazy, and maybe he was. This entire idea had left him so unsettled that off-the-beam was really the wrong way to describe it. Off his nut might’ve been better.

“Really,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I
love
math. It was one of my best subjects in school, and I use it all the time, because I love organizing.”

He almost said with a mathematician’s sneer,
That’s not math. That’s arithmetic.
But he needed to shut up now. He needed to stop talking and let her say something.

“Math is a phenomenal thing,” Julka was saying. “You can represent it with sticks on the simplest level—you know, one-plus-one-equals-two kinda thing. Then math starts getting really complex, and you have to
imagine
it and sometimes you have to trust it, and there are pockets of it and corners of it that no one understands at all.”