08 Illusion (9 page)

The doors were still closing, closing …

She made a timid movement toward the alcove …

Oh, God help me!
She grabbed for the coat. It was wavy like everything else, dim and fuzzy as if Mandy were seeing it through a tea-stained window. She grabbed hold. The coat felt like warm plasticine in her fingers. She pulled it toward her—

The coat broke through the tea-stained window and shimmering heat waves and became clear, crisp, and real in her hands.

Almost closed.

“I’ll bring it back, I promise!” she called, dashing through the narrow opening a millisecond before the doors would have clamped on her foot.

chapter

9

I
n Hayden, Idaho, Dane signed his name to a good-size check and slid it across the desk to the Realtor along with all the duly signed papers. A handshake, warm wishes, and a welcome, and he was out the door with the papers and the keys in his hand.

He got in his car and made a left turn onto Howard, a four-lane that would take him back to I-95, the corridor that connected Coeur d’Alene and Hayden with the northern reaches of the Idaho panhandle and the Canadian border. His new ranch was maybe twenty minutes away, traffic allowing, which it probably would.

Only two blocks up the avenue, he happened to pass a minivan full of high school kids going the other way. He didn’t notice them, they didn’t notice him, and as he turned onto I-95, they pulled into the parking lot of the Realtor’s office.

“All right, here you go.” Doris, the most talkative of the five teenagers, slid the side door open and pitched her own seat forward so Mandy could climb out.

Mandy stepped down to the parking lot, careful not to lose her slippers. “Thanks, you guys!”

“See ya ’round!” “Good luck!” They all waved and drove off, some of the nicest people Mandy had had the pleasure to meet since the day she suddenly quit knowing anybody. She waved, she smiled, they disappeared around the corner …

And the smile fell from her face. It was just another lie anyway, another act on top of the one that got her here: “Hi, I’m a nursing student and my boyfriend and I just had a terrible fight so he drove off and left me to find my own ride home. Which way are you going—can you give me a lift? Hey, far out!”

It got her a ride clear out to Hayden, even though those kids were only going as far as Coeur d’Alene.

She felt soiled, so much that she couldn’t pray.

Maybe she should have kept trusting the miracle just as the apostle Peter did when an angel sneaked him out of prison right past the guards. It seemed she’d just played out her own version of that story, walking in a weird dream or vision right through those double doors, down a stairway to an outside exit, and safely to a quiet residential street several blocks from the hospital where she “came to herself” just as Peter did. Everything snapped back into
real
and there she was, standing on a solid sidewalk on a solid street with solid houses, still dressed in her blue scrubs, goofy slippers, and borrowed coat, with no clue what to do next. It was a miracle.

Finding the kids in that van at McDonald’s was a miracle, too, a van with an empty seat going clear to Coeur d’Alene, driven by a bunch of kids who bought her story and drove the extra miles just to take care of her. It had to be the hand of God—but she lied to make it happen.

She slouched, weak with shame.

So what if she’d trusted the miracle and told the truth? “Hi, I just escaped from the mental ward at the hospital and I wonder if you could give me a ride home? It’s out of town—way out of town.” Maybe they would have said yes anyway because they were angels God had sent. Maybe they would have had a complete change of clothes for her, too, just her size, including a decent pair of shoes, and maybe they would have taken her to North Lakeland Road and it would have looked just the way it was supposed to look and not … like this.

She looked up at the real estate office. This was the landmark that caught her eye, that made her tell her friends-for-the-moment they could let her off here. The two-story farmhouse had new siding, new windows, a new roof, perfect planting beds, and a paved parking lot where the front yard used to be, but she knew this house. Her best friend, Joanie Gittel, used to live here. They met when they started first grade and waited together at the bus stop right across the road. Howard Road.

Mandy looked across the four-lane street. There was a city bus stop where her school bus stop used to be, and a sign on the corner: Howard Way. The name of the cross street was North Lakeland Avenue. She could have guessed that from the name of the realty that had moved into Joanie’s house: Lakeland Realty.

Her mind came to a standstill. All she could do was look, and look again, but nothing clicked. There was no figuring it out, and right now God wasn’t helping her.

She went to the curb, looked both ways just as Mommy and Daddy always taught her, and hurried across with the first opening in the traffic. The bus stop was a small shelter with a concrete bench, a trash can, and a posted bus schedule. She sat on the bench and looked back across the street.

She remembered. Mrs. Gittel would watch from that front door until the bus came, and wave as it carried Mandy and Joanie and thirty other kids away for the day.
There used to be an old garage right next to the house where Mr. Gittel kept his ’57 Ford, and there used to be a big apple tree in the front yard—Gravensteins. Daddy built the bus stop that used to be here and even put a cedar shake roof on it.
She remembered it being about the same size, but she was remembering it through a child’s eyes, so it was probably smaller.
There was no sidewalk then, only the gravel shoulder, the ditch, the white paddock fence, and the hayfield.

She stopped, troubled at herself. She was
remembering.
She was thinking words such as “then” and “used to be.”

She got to her feet, reining in her thoughts, putting on the mental brakes. This wasn’t the real now, this was some kind of delusion, and it would break, it would dissolve away and this whole nightmare would be over. She just had to find her old mailbox, her old driveway …

No! She stomped her foot. Not her
old
driveway, her
driveway
! Not her
old
mailbox, her
mailbox
! And the bus stop that Daddy built was sun-bleached and leaning a bit, but four, five … however many days it was ago … it was here, and there was no four-lane street and the Gittels’ house was still their house and it was gray, not forest green.

She hurried up the sidewalk along the two-lane avenue that North Lakeland Road had become, holding her hand to the side of her face to block her eyes from seeing concrete, asphalt, parked cars, businesses. No, they weren’t really there. She was on her way home, and there was a hayfield—she could imagine it so clearly—and a white paddock fence and hay cut short and a ditch where little frogs floated with just their eyes and noses out of the water, and a field with Daddy’s horses and a paddock with llamas watching her come home with those big brown eyes.

She tried to run but could only shuffle-run in the slippers. Cars passed on her left and they were so close, so noisy. She smelled their rubber and exhaust and the oily stench of the pavement, not the old smells—no, the
smells
!—that used to—no, that still
did
!—bring her joy as she walked this
road
, not this
street
: cut hay, wildflowers, apple blossoms.

She shuffle-ran until she was gasping, but the concrete sidewalk never ended and she never found the mailbox. She dared to lower her hand and look, hoping, trying to have faith, but there was no driveway, there were no pastures or fences, no big house on the hill. She looked back, down that long white ribbon of concrete, and saw the Gittels’ house appearing as small as it always appeared from the Whitacre mailbox. She looked up the hill, across acres of blacktop, over curbed islands of lawn and young planted firs, past rows of automobiles and gaggles of moms, kids, and grocery carts, and saw an Albertson’s grocery store, a Hancock Fabrics, a Starbucks, a Rite Aid, and a thrift store.

And they wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard she tried not to believe in them.

And this was the dream, their new adventure?

Dane shut the ponderous, hand-carved front door then leaned his back against it, suddenly bereft of any reason to move. Under his feet was the slate tiled foyer, and just ahead, the sunken living room with red oak floor, cathedral ceiling, and large pane windows with gorgeous views of mountains, forests, fields, a Dutch-style barn, and a pond big enough to be called a lake. The former owner had done well and grown ambitious in his latter years; the house came to forty-nine hundred square feet altogether. The kitchen was sized for entertaining, with an elongated center island and surrounding counters and cabinets; a dual access staircase led up to an open office overlooking the great room and a master suite boasting cathedral windows, a stylish double-vanity bathroom, infrared sauna, whirlpool tub, walk-in shower, and walk-in closet. There were two other bedrooms and a full, unfinished basement, a blank slate he and Mandy could have utilized any way they wanted.

Yes, a big, beautiful home for big, beautiful dreams: a theatrical management company; research and development of new effects and illusions; a Christian kids’ magic camp; some books, some memoirs, some articles, and why not some horses or anything else they had yet to imagine, for this would be a new season in their life, a promised land far from Egypt, a fresh garden for new ideas grown their way.

At least that was the idea.

There was no chair, no furniture at all to sit on, so Dane sank to the tiles with his back against the door, taking up maybe three of the forty-nine hundred square feet. He could hear the air moving against the walls. The sound of his own breathing traveled along the wood floors, high ceilings, and huge windows and came whispering back to him like Noah’s dove after her first mission: there’s nothing in here. The dreams never made it through the front door.

Why did I even—

The answer came quicker than it took to think the question: because it was going to be he and Mandy. She was going to be carrying plans and sketches down those stairs to show him; they were going to try some new French recipes in that kitchen; she was going to be napping under that window, dancing with him on the red oak floor, combing through that closet for her other glove, walking out in the morning light to feed her doves in that barn; they were going to make love in the starlight coming through those windows.

But now his eyes fell on the silver urn in his hands and he knew. Of course he knew.

She was the dream. The house was just a frame around the picture.

No wonder the house felt so empty.

Just like him.

They were real—Albertson’s, Rite Aid, Hancock Fabrics, Starbucks, all of them—real. She touched the concrete, the stonework, the windows; she pulled open the doors and looked inside. She could feel, hear, smell them. She could see her pitiful reflection in their windows. She was here, they were here.

Which meant, as near as she could explain it, that she was lost, really lost, hyperlost, even to herself. She could see the reflection of a walking body in the glass, but what was it, and when, and where, and who was in there? Certainly no one she knew.

Mandy Whitacre lived here from 1951 to 1970.

The girl in the blue scrubs and the coat that didn’t fit, with her slippers coming apart, didn’t. She couldn’t have.

Mandy Whitacre had a father, nineteen years of a wonderful life, a home.

The crazy-looking girl in the glass didn’t.

No father. No Daddy waiting for her, no Daddy standing there with her.

Whose daddy? Whose father was he in that other place, that other time, if not hers? Whose memory had she stolen? Had he ever existed at all?

There was one thing she knew. She didn’t want to know it, but she did. Everything in her mind had gone adrift like a drowning swimmer, kicking, struggling, not touching bottom anywhere, but this one thing had never budged from the time she stepped out of that minivan, and now, bigger than ever, here it was: He was gone. No lemonade today; there was no Daddy.

The girl in the glass was starting to shake and stare back at her with crazed animal eyes.
Oh, they are going to lock me up for sure!
She’d better hide.

Her mind did not record how she got behind all those big buildings, back on the blank side of the thrift store where there were no windows or signs, just steel loading doors and steel people doors and heaps of flattened cardboard boxes and packing materials strewn around big metal Dumpsters. Her first awareness, the first thing she knew she could know, was that she was huddled against one of the Dumpsters holding pieces of crumpled cardboard up against her face as if that would muffle the sounds she could not contain. She wailed, she quivered, she cried, begging God without words, pouring out anguish without thought. She didn’t breathe, she gasped in anger, pain, fear, and despair, shaking but not caring, not knowing, not knowing, not knowing …

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!”

She didn’t hear a car pull up. She didn’t hear a car door open and close. She hardly felt the touch on her leg. When she did, she grappled for more cardboard trying to bury herself, wriggling and wailing something like
no no no.
She heaped the panels on top of herself, curling up, trying to hide under them.

It was a lady’s voice; it sounded so faint on the other side of the cardboard. “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you!”