Chapter 47

What to tell them, what they would believe, that was the problem. After the round of incredulous embraces, the jubilant phone calls, once her parents and sisters and friends had told Nora over and over again how glad they were to see her and how grateful she was safe, the questions popped to the surface as vigorously as divers that have been underwater ten seconds too long.

Where were you? What happened? What were you doing all this time? Why couldn’t you at least call and let us know that you were all right? Do you know how worried we were? To Nora’s dismay, a town police officer also came to take a statement, and reporters from the local stations arrived to do their stand-ups in the front yard.

It was clear enough to everyone that Nora had been through some sort of trauma. The scars on her face and torso had not entirely disappeared. The doctor who examined her diagnosed a recent concussion and signs of exposure. She was underweight, although otherwise healthy. She could not give a clear account of her whereabouts for the past ten and a half months.

Yes, Nora told the cop, she had left the cabin for a walk, then gotten lost on the mountainside. An animal had mauled her. A bear? She couldn’t remember. She fell and broke her ankle. Some people found her, took care of her. They lived in the country. No telephone or electricity. Her stepmother examined the long-skirted dress she had been wearing and pronounced it hand-sewn.

The cop asked why she was wearing a wedding ring. No, I’m not married, Nora said. Yes, a man gave it to me, but it was sort of a joke. Then it wouldn’t come off. How did she get to New Jersey? Someone drove me, Nora said vaguely. The cop pressed her for the names of the people she’d stayed with. Nora mentioned an older woman named Mrs. Toristel, who had died a few weeks ago. A heart attack.

The cop didn’t buy much of the story, Nora could tell, but on the other hand Nora was no longer missing and insisted she had not been kidnapped, so he didn’t seem particularly motivated to investigate further. He did ask her to spell Mrs. Toristel’s name. Nora had to stop and think about the English transliteration.

“First name?”

“Margaret,” Nora ad-libbed.

Her mother flew in from Richmond, and it was almost as bizarre as traveling between worlds to see her sitting in the kitchen of the old house in New Jersey again and drinking coffee with Kathy and Nora’s father. Nora’s mother eyed the new kitchen wallpaper but said nothing about it. At dinner, everyone told Nora to eat more, she was too thin, and her father kept topping up her wineglass, although Nora was careful not to drink too much, because Kathy was watching her closely in case it was alcohol that had taken her away for so many months. Nora was also afraid of blurting out something so unbelievable that her family would take alarm. Bad enough that she’d slipped up and said how great it was to hear English again. Then she had to explain that the people who’d taken her in spoke some foreign language—no, not Spanish—a language she couldn’t recognize. They spoke a little English, too. That was how she got by.

She withdrew upstairs when she could, and everyone watched her go, their fond eyes sharp. Lying in bed in her sister Leigh’s room, exhausted but unable to sleep, she listened to the three adults talking, their voices wafting up like smoke. Her parents had never seemed to realize how easy it was for their children upstairs to hear almost every word they said downstairs.

They were talking about her, of course. Kathy was saying they could go by the hospital tomorrow to get the ring cut off. “She said she hates it but it’s stuck on her finger.”

They started discussing the ring and its possible significance. Listening to them, Nora began to see that, in a way, Raclin’s ring was useful. It answered the most questions. Nora had gotten mixed up with some man. She’d lost her head and followed him into who knows what kind of life, and now, thank God, it was over. Opinion was divided as to whether Nora had come to her senses on her own or whether the man had dropped her. They also could not agree on what sort of milieu Nora had been living in, and whether drugs or motorcycles or unorthodox religious or political beliefs had been involved.

“She said she hadn’t had pizza for a year.” Kathy, bemused. “Could it have been some kind of radical, vegan, back-to-the-land group? And she looked as though she hadn’t bathed for days.”

“I could just kill her for running off, if I wasn’t so happy to see her again. We are so blessed to have her back.” Her mother, unable to resist bringing God into it.

“Yes, it is a blessing.” Her father, trying to be gracious.

In the other bed, Leigh rolled over and sighed noisily, as if to signal that the conversation downstairs was too inane to sleep through. “It’s so weird to think of Dad ever being married to your mom,” she announced.

“Yeah,” Nora said.

“You glad to be back or are you already regretting it?”

“It’s good. Really good.”

“How’d you get to be so thin? Was it drugs?”

“No!” Nora’s turn to flop over in annoyance. “Why is everyone so interested in my weight?”

“Well, you look anorexic.”

“I’m not that thin! No, I had to walk a long way, and I didn’t have much to eat.”

“Where were you walking to?”

“It was on the way home.”

“And you don’t have any idea where you were?”

“Not really. Somewhere in the mountains.”

Leigh grunted dubiously. After a while she said: “They didn’t find your body, so I thought there was a chance you were alive. But remains can skeletonize in a matter of weeks in warm weather—and animals scatter them—so I also figured that maybe they just missed you.”

A sizable chunk of the books on Leigh’s bookshelf were true-crime titles, Nora had noticed before the lights went out. That was new. “I’m really sorry. It must have been scary, not knowing.”

“Well, yeah. Mom and Dad freaked. Not that you can blame them.”

“I’m sorry,” Nora said again. A car swooshed by outside, then another. She was going to have to get used to all this noise.

“The worst part is that they took it out on me. If I get home two minutes late, they’re ready to call the police. Hopefully they’ll ease up now since you weren’t actually murdered. So, yeah, next time you flip out and run away, be considerate and text someone, okay?”

“Okay,” Nora said.

•   •   •

The next morning, in the kitchen, she dropped her mug—after all those months without coffee, the caffeine was setting her nerves ablaze—and watched it break on the floor. Without even thinking about it, she started piecing the fragments together. And nothing happened. The shards did not cohere. She could not even say they refused to cohere. The mug was simply broken and remained so.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a souvenir mug,” Kathy said, noticing how stricken Nora looked. “We got it when we took the girls to Disney World.”

Later, Nora fished the pieces out of the trash and tried again. Nothing.

•   •   •

With each day, it was more and more as though she had never been away at all. Her mother went back to Virginia and only called twice a day. Reporters stopped calling. Her stepmother suggested that Nora see a counselor, but she was not pressing the point as hard as she could have. Nora herself could see the time was coming when she would not think twice about listening to music that came out of a box or taking an aspirin for a headache or driving along a street that was lined with signs and advertisements because pretty much everyone could read. She went so far as to let Kathy try to get the ring cut off at the emergency room, thinking that Raclin’s curse couldn’t possibly follow her to another world—although afterward she thought what a stupid chance to take, no one here would know what to do if she turned to stone.

Overall, she was readjusting nicely. Not more than a dozen times a day did she wonder what was happening back in that other world.

There was no way to calculate the time difference, of course. A few days could have passed there. Or months. But surely Aruendiel must be back at his castle. What was he doing now? Various images came to mind. Aruendiel leafing through a book in his tower study. On horseback. Wrapped in his black cape, moving with a jerky stride through snowy woods. Supping in the great hall, his gray eyes warming as he talked about magic. She could almost hear the rumble of his voice. But to whom would he be talking? And these were just recorded pictures in her brain. His real life was unfolding without her knowledge. She could only guess at its course.

She should have asked Aruendiel to teach her that observation spell, so that she could check in from time to time. But she couldn’t work magic anymore, she reminded herself.

A small gray feather blew past her one day, as she was helping her father spade his tomato patch. She dropped the hoe and grabbed for it, but the wind took it out of her reach. As it disappeared behind a neighbor’s satellite dish, her father asked what she was staring at.

Sometimes she wondered—just out of curiosity—about the magician friend of Aruendiel’s who was supposed to be in this world. Micher Something. Micher Samle. But all she knew about Micher Samle was that he liked to transform himself into a mouse, and had once lived in a cave. Not much to go on, even if she felt like scouring the rodent-infested underground caverns of the world.

It was a trade-off, Nora decided sternly. She had her life back. Her family. The comforts of twenty-first-century American civilization. And English literature. Now she could lose herself in a novel again—any novel, not just Pride and Prejudice—and in a way, that was when she felt most at home. That first week, she went through one or two books a day, using her sister’s library card. There was no particular logic to her choices, except that—Nora saw as soon as she considered it—they were generally realist novels, rooted in the observation of the here and now, nothing fantastical about them. She had no taste for anything but the most pragmatic of genres. When she finished a novel, she started another one right away.

She was close to the end of Augie March one afternoon when her sister Ramona, seeing how few pages remained, helpfully said that she could borrow any of the Harry Potters from Ramona’s own bookshelf.

“No, thanks,” Nora said absently. Lifting her hand to turn the page, she squeezed her sister’s sock-clad foot. They were reading companionably at opposite ends of the leather couch in the den, Nora leaning against one arm, Ramona sprawled against the other.

“Why not?”

“It’s a kids’ book. I feel like reading something more serious, for grown-ups.”

“Lots of grown-ups read Harry Potter. It’s all about magic, you know.”

“I’m aware of that.” The books probably got all the magic wrong, Nora thought.

“So why aren’t you interested?”

“I’m just not. Shh, I’m reading.” Then—because it was still fresh and gratifying even to be able to be interrupted by her little sister—Nora looked up and asked: “What are you reading?”

Ramona turned the book over so that Nora could see the cover. “Ms. Kessenides at school said it was funny.”

Pride and Prejudice. Nora sat still. “What do you think?” she asked after a moment.

“It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s funny,” Ramona judged. “It’s also kind of dumb.”

“Dumb”—not a word Nora usually associated with Jane Austen. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s so obvious that he’s in love with her. And she doesn’t even realize it until he actually asks her to marry him.”

Nora cocked her head, pleased that Ramona was reading critically, not sure that she was reading carefully enough. “But he’s so rude to her. And she doesn’t get to hear Darcy say she has fine eyes, remember.”

“When Noah Hurst poured his Coke into Janine Perez’s locker, everyone knew that he liked her.”

“Oh,” Nora said. Sixth grade at Woodrow Wilson Middle School might be better preparation for reading Jane Austen than one might think.

“And Elizabeth’s supposed to be smart!” Ramona said in a tone of grievance.

Nora took the book from Ramona and flipped through it. A much newer, sturdier copy than the frail paperback she’d left behind in the other world. Chapter 34, that was as far as she’d gotten with her Ors translation. She kept turning pages.

How despicably have I acted, Elizabeth Bennet cried—I, who have prided myself on my discernment! Elizabeth has just read Darcy’s letter, and realized how thoroughly she has misread Wickham and Darcy. Her bad judgment about Wickham will cause mischief; her mistake about Darcy is potentially more costly, and only she will know why. Mentally, Nora put the sentence into Ors, then imagined Aruendiel reading it from her wax tablet. She was not sure she had used the right word to translate “discernment.” Aruendiel would know. Suddenly she felt fiercely, shatteringly homesick for him. He was out of reach forever, for all the remaining minutes and days and years of her life. Oh, gods, she thought, what did I do? How could I not see how much—? Till this moment I never knew myself.

Ramona said: “What happened to that magician, Arundill?”

Hearing his name was a fierce electric thrill. Nora tried to look unmoved. “Aruendiel,” she corrected Ramona, keeping her voice low. “He’s fine.” She hoped.

“Why didn’t you tell them about him, about the other world?”

“They wouldn’t believe me.”

“They didn’t believe me. But I’m just a kid. I bet they’d believe you.”

“You told them about the night you saw me?” Nora had been wondering about this. Ramona had said nothing to Nora about a spectral visit from her and a tall, dark magician. Nora presumed she must have forgotten all about it.

Ramona nodded. “At first, when I told them, they got all excited. And then when I said it was magic—how you were visiting from another world—they got mad and said I was lying. I told them about the spell he put on Friday to make her talk, but I’m the only one who can understand her. They think she’s just meowing.

“’Course, Friday doesn’t really say anything worth listening to,” Ramona added. “She just gripes about her cat food and says rude things about us.”

“I’ve heard her.” The day before, Nora had barely caught herself from responding, right in front of Kathy, when the cat made an acid comment about the size of Nora’s feet.

“Really? That’s good. I was starting to think, you know, that maybe my brain was making all this stuff up.”

“No, it’s real,” Nora said reluctantly. Should she be saying these things to Ramona, who was already so prone to fantasizing? Was believing in alternate realities going to help her in sixth grade and the rest of her life? “It did happen, but you shouldn’t think about it too much,” she said stoutly. “Because we have our lives to live right here, in this world, and we don’t need magic.”

“Why not? You can still do magic, right? Arundill was teaching you, you said.”

“I haven’t even tried since I got back,” Nora lied.

“What?”

“There’s no reason to.” Ramona looked incredulous, so Nora went on: “In that other world, they need magic because they don’t have anything else. There’s no science, no medicine. You wouldn’t believe how much better things are here, really.” To her own ears, Nora did not sound as convincing as she hoped.

“But that’s so stupid! Aren’t you going to go back?”

“Of course not.”

“I can’t believe you, Nora! You are so retarded.”

“Don’t say ‘retarded.’” Kathy was strict on this point—no insults that slighted the disabled.

“Why not?” Ramona’s voice rose on strong wings of outrage. “You were learning magic—from a magician—in a castle, and you decided to come back here to be a Muggle. That’s the textbook definition of retarded. You know how lucky you were?”

“Not so loud,” Nora hissed. Leigh was upstairs; Kathy would be home any minute. “I had to make a choice, Ramona. I chose you guys. I missed you. Everyone thought I was dead. When I was here that night, I saw how upset you were. Dad was drunk because of me. And now he’s not drinking. So, yeah, I made the right choice.”

“Oh, Dad getting drunk, that stopped months ago,” Ramona said matter-of-factly. “Mom blew up over Christmas and he goes to AA now. They think I don’t know.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good,” Nora said, taken aback. “But I had to come back so that everyone would stop worrying.”

“Well, yeah,” Ramona said. “But I thought you came back only for a little while, to show them you were okay. I didn’t know you were going to stay. Don’t you miss that other place at all? Don’t you miss the magic?” She was tensed, as though ready for Nora to deliver bad news.

“Yes, I do, very much,” Nora said. She had to take a deep breath, the truth came out so fast. “I can’t tell you how much I miss—everything.” The magic. Aruendiel. Herself.

“I knew it! So you’ll go back?”

“Oh, honey.” Nora hated to say anything to spoil the glee on her sister’s face. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how. I came back through a door, and it’s shut now.”

Ramona’s brow furrowed. “But no one said you couldn’t go back, right, the way Aslan keeps telling people they can’t come back? There’s no rule that says you can’t go back?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Arundill will help you get back.” Ramona spoke with utter confidence.

“But I can’t reach him. And he thought I should come back here.”

“Why? That doesn’t make any sense. I bet he didn’t want you to go. And you miss him, too, don’t you?”

By way of answer, Nora gathered her little sister in her arms and hugged her, the way she had wanted to the night when Ramona thought she was a ghost. She felt a little better, although embracing her sister did not crush the loneliness she felt. “How did you get to be so smart?” she whispered in Ramona’s ear.

“I could tell from how he talked to you, that night, he likes you. A lot.”

“I wish I’d been smart enough to see that.”

Ramona studied her for a moment. “You have to go back,” she said simply. “You’ll find a way. We could go camping in those mountains where you got lost, and try to get back from there. Or, your ring!” She grabbed at Nora’s hand. “It’s magic, isn’t it? That’s why it broke the clipper at the hospital?”

“But not good magic.” Nora jerked her hand back. That vile ring. How sickening that it was the only tangible connection she had to her other life. Her real life, she could see now.

But if this link survived, she thought slowly, there may be others. There might be other gateways. Going back to the mountains—I could try that. I’ve traveled between worlds twice now. I know something about magic. Surely I can find my way home.

Ramona was still fascinated by the ring. “The only way to get it off is if you cut your finger off,” she was saying. “They’ll call you Nine-fingered Nora.” Delicately she lifted Nora’s ring finger and gave it a nip, her teeth clicking against the gold.

Nora thought of the expression on Aruendiel’s face when she had once made a similar suggestion, and wondered again how she could have been so blind, stupid and blind, she who had prided herself on her discernment. But she only said, “No fighting, no biting,” the way her parents used to when she and EJ were little, when magic was something you only read about in books.

What was it Aruendiel had said? Pick your path with intent. At least, she thought, now I know where I’m going.