Falling In (18 page)

“All my grandmother ever taught me was to play bridge.” Charley smiled at Isabelle. “Pretty boring.”

Isabelle nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

She left the nurse’s office and turned in the direction of the cafeteria. As she walked down the long corridor, thoughts drifted out into the hallway from underneath doorways and followed her. Isabelle could feel them coming up from behind. She could make out bits and pieces of words. She knew she had a lot of work to do.

Maybe she wouldn’t have time to miss everything she’d left behind.

I still hear children’s thoughts from time to time, but mostly it’s Grete’s thoughts I hear, old woman thoughts, arthritic thoughts, thoughts that think they’re forty years younger than they actually are. She needs help weeding the garden or putting together a packet of goldenseal powder, and it distresses her that she can’t do her job as well as she used to. I hear the distress, and then it stops. That’s when I know Hen has arrived.

I wish I could hear Hen’s and Samuel’s thoughts, but I can’t. I’m a half changeling. My gifts are limited.

In fact, I’m afraid they’re fading into nothingness.

So, yes, you’ve probably seen me and my mom, a
relatively normal pair, a woman nearing sixty and her daughter about to graduate from high school, a little strange-looking, maybe, a silver strand of other-worldliness barely visible along their spines, but nothing too out of the ordinary about either of us as we walk through town and knock on doors, pull on the handles, poke our heads hopefully inside.

It was hard at first to convince my mom to come look, as you might imagine. It took some doing. A lot of storytelling. This story, as a matter of fact.

My mother, the changeling. When I came back from the other world, I clung to her like a dryer sheet to the back of a nylon blouse. I examined her top to toe, interpreted the constellations of freckles on her arms, hid in closets and behind doors, just to see if she’d do anything odd or even magic (maybe fairy dust had rubbed off on her when she’d been stolen; you never could tell).

It turned out that for the most part, my mother was just a mom, a stressed-out mom who worried she didn’t know what she was doing, a mother who’d never been mothered herself, or been a daughter for that matter.

But: Once, a few months after I’d come back, I cut my arm on an exposed nail—it was a light cut, a ribbon of red, the blood barely rising from the skin—and my mother put her hand over the wound—

And the cut disappeared.

True story.

“Put your hand over mine,” I told her the first time I took her to the nurse’s office. “And believe. Just believe for five seconds. That’s all it will take.”

It didn’t work. Is it because my mother doesn’t really believe? Or is it because I’m getting too old, too practical, too mature?

Anyway, I was thinking . . .

Maybe you could help me?

The doors are out there. If you could just twist a few out-of-the-way doorknobs, check the custodian’s closet at your school, pay attention to the ground under the soles of your shoes—

If you feel a buzz beneath your toes, let me know.