The Power of Un (6 page)

“I didn’t say anything,” I said, only it came out more like, “I-n’tshee-ing.” I couldn’t seem to get my tongue to work.

A tear spilled down Mom’s cheek, and she swiped it away. She was still wearing her square-dance jacket. The silvery moonlight made the sequins glitter like magic, and I fell asleep again, back into a repeating dream of trying to get up to search for the unner.

W
hen I woke up the next morning, the tired wob-blies were gone. I lay in bed for a minute, picturing a horrendous scene in which I wandered out to the kitchen and asked Mom and Dad how Roxy was. I was afraid of what the answer might be, afraid of having to tell them it was my fault. I smelled waffles and bacon, usually my favorite breakfast. But I didn’t feel very hungry. What I did feel was an overpowering urge to run to the woods and find the unner so I could undo the whole terrible mess.

I threw back the covers, pulled on some jeans and a sweatshirt, and headed for the front door. I had my hand on the knob when Mom called from the kitchen. “Gib, are you up? We need to talk.”

I whacked myself on the forehead—I should’ve
been walking more quietly. “Could I just do one thing first? It’s really important.”

Mom came to the kitchen door holding a bacon fork. She looked pretty bad. Her eyes were puffy and had dark circles under them.

“This is really important, too. It’s about … Roxy.”

My throat got hot and dry all of a sudden. I could see the news wasn’t good.

I was trembling by the time I sat down at the table. There was a place set for Dad—a yellow plate and a blue checkered napkin, a tall glass of orange juice, shiny silverware, and the newspaper still folded and unread. He wasn’t there.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

Mom took a breath but didn’t say anything. She looked as if she might start crying any second. I felt my heart pounding slowly somewhere around my throat. The bacon continued to sizzle in the pan, just as if this were any other Saturday morning, but my stomach felt like a black hole. I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What?” I said. “If she’s dead, just tell me, O.K.?”

“Oh, honey,” said Mom. The bacon fork clattered to the counter as she hugged me and gave me a kiss on top of my head. “No, she’s not dead. Dad’s been at the hospital with her all night. He’s still there.”

She pulled out Dad’s chair and sat down. She looked at me hard, the corners of her mouth drooping
as if they were heavy. Maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was strong enough to hear what she had to say next, or maybe she was working up her own courage. “I love you, so I’m not going to lie to you. Her head is injured. She’s got brain damage, and she’s in a coma. Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. “She’s asleep, but she can’t wake up?” My voice came out thin and tight as a wire.

Mom nodded. “The doctors don’t know what’ll happen. She might wake up and be O.K. eventually. She might not. We just don’t know.”

About a hundred questions jammed my head at once. Before I could make the first one into a sentence, the phone rang. Mom jumped as if she’d heard a firecracker. She raced across the room and picked up the receiver before the second ring.

She said hello, and then, “The scans look bad? But what …” She listened for a long moment, then said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all, “How can they know that? How can they be sure she’ll never wake up?” And she started to cry. Only it wasn’t just ordinary crying. It was much worse. It wasn’t a scream. A scream would have been normal compared to this. It was like all the world’s grief and sadness wrapped up in a ball you could hear and feel but not see.

I didn’t know the details, but I knew enough. Roxy’s heart might beat for days; it might beat for
years. But she’d never talk, never move from her bed, never again be the person she was last night.

It’s hard to describe how it felt knowing all this. I hadn’t thought I liked her all that much. I’d mainly seen her as a set of problems to get around: keep her out of my bedroom, play games with her when I didn’t want to, let her tag along with me even when I was doing things she was too little to do. Sometimes when she was mad at me, she lied to get me in trouble. “
Da-a-a-d
, I think Gib’s about to hit me,” she’d say, even when I wasn’t. And when Dad scolded me for it, half the time she’d stick her tongue out just to make me even madder.

But knowing she’d spend the rest of her life in a coma changed everything. I thought about all the stuff I’d never do again. Never play doggy with her. Never defend her from bullies at school. Never feel big and brave letting her hide her face in my shoulder when we watched a scary movie together. She’d never have another candy apple or plate of Dad’s beef stew. She’d never find out what it felt like to be a grownup. Her dream of having a dog would never come true. It was all my fault.

I don’t know how much time passed while I thought all this. Probably not more than a minute, though it felt much longer. Suddenly I thought I’d go crazy if I sat on that kitchen chair one more second. I couldn’t stand it. Everything was coming apart. I had
to try something, even if it didn’t work, to make things better again.

The unner.

I could have used it the previous night if I hadn’t been such an idiot and dropped it in the first place. Then Mom wouldn’t be standing here with tears spilling down her face, and Roxy would be O.K.
Take it with you tonight, but watch out
, the old man had said. He must have known this was about to happen. I didn’t know how or why, but he’d come to deliver the unner to me, to give me a way of undoing the worst mistake of my life.

I jumped up and ran for the front door. “I’ll be back really soon, Mom,” I yelled. If she heard me, she didn’t show any sign of it. She seemed to be standing in our kitchen with the phone dangling from her wrist, but she wasn’t really there. The real Mom was someplace far away, down deep inside herself. I’ve never had a nightmare that scared me any worse than seeing her like that.

    I ran down our front walk, angry at myself and angry at everything in general. It should have been stormy, black and rainy. But it wasn’t. Birds chirped, and the sun shone down from a sky as pure as a blue crayon. It was as if the world didn’t care one bit what had happened to Roxy. Where our walkway met Cherrywood Drive, I stopped short. There sat the mangy stray dog looking up at me with its tongue out
and its ears up, its tail wagging just a little, as if it thought tail-wagging might get it in trouble.

It was right.

My breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. I felt hot and sad and furious. Of all the places in town that stupid dog could have gone to beg for a handout, it had to choose my house.

“I wish that truck had hit
you
!” I cried. I picked up a pebble and threw it with all my might. I don’t know exactly what made me aim wide. Maybe it was the way the dog sat, its head tilted, trusting me even though it shouldn’t have. The pebble smacked the sidewalk. The dog flinched, ran a short distance away, and sat down on the sidewalk again. I threw another stone. “Get away! Get away!” I screamed.

I didn’t wait to see what happened. I sped toward the woods as fast as I could. The wind from my running blew tears back along my face in cold streaks. But I couldn’t afford to cry much. I had to be able to see. If it was the last thing I ever did, I’d find the unner and make it work.

I ran down the path, my high tops skidding on leaves slick with half-melted frost. At the big flat-topped rock I stood panting while I tried to remember every move I’d made the night before.

A voice drifted through the red and yellow trees. “Gib, Gib! Wait up!” Ash burst into sight. “Didn’t you hear me?”

I would have said no, but I couldn’t get my vocal cords to work. They felt locked in ice so cold it burned.

Ash stood very still, looking at me. “Roxy? …” he said, his voice breaking off in the middle.

I’d rather have eaten dirt than cried in front of Ash. But it happened anyway. I tried to hold it back and couldn’t.

Ash stood there scratching a place on his leg that probably didn’t itch as much as it appeared to. It’s simple if somebody’s crying for a reason that’s not very good. You can just shrug and get on with whatever you’re doing until they stop acting like a baby. But I had a good reason, and Ash knew it.

“Bad news, huh?” he said. He sat down on the big rock, watching me and waiting for me to tell him.

I went and sat next to him, scrubbing at my eyes while my voice unfroze. “She’s got brain damage. The doctors say she’ll never wake up.”

He sat silent for a long moment, looking as if he’d been slugged in the stomach. I knew exactly how he felt. After a little while, he picked up a twig and broke it in half. “Jeez,” he said.

I nodded, feeling completely miserable. “I have to find the unner. It’s my only chance.”

Ash looked puzzled. “What’s the unner?”

“Well, it’s like this….” I said, and told him the whole story of the weird old man, his mysterious gift,
and what had happened the previous afternoon. “He said it would give me the Power of Un, the power to undo my mistakes, just like on a computer.”

Ash cocked one eyebrow. “Are you serious? How do you know the old man wasn’t just … you know … some demented weirdo? Or working for Madam Isis, like I said last night?”

“He smelled like lightning, Ash. Lightning! How could an ordinary demented weirdo smell like lightning? And what about the message he gave Madam Isis? He knew about Roxy’s accident before it ever happened.”

Ash whistled softly. “You mean, if you find this thing, the unner, and it’s real….” He blinked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say “You mean you could undo the whole thing? Go back and do it over without mistakes? You could make it so Roxy’s O.K. again?”

I thought about it a minute, afraid to let myself hope too much. “Well, maybe,” I said. “He told me there were limits, though he didn’t say what they were. He had to leave before he could show me how it worked. And …” I swallowed as the facts came back with unpleasant clarity. “I tried and couldn’t get it to work just before I dropped it.”

Ash jumped to his feet. “What are we waiting for? Show me where you dropped it, and we can both look. We’ll find it! And maybe between the two of us, we can make it work.”

I retraced my steps along the path, “Look for a root or a rock—something that might have tripped me,” I said.

Before long, we spied a patch of disturbed leaves. Not only that. We found a thick root running across the path. It had to be the spot. We both got down on our hands and knees and started searching as fast as we could.

A few minutes later, Ash whooped and shouted, “Hey, is this it?” I looked over, and there, held aloft like a torch in his hand, was a gunmetal gray box about the size of a paperback book. The unner!

Ash sat cross-legged on the ground as he brushed away dirt and twigs and shook the unner gently to see if it rattled, which it did. “Jeeminy,” he said. “Are you sure this is it? I mean … well … it kind of looks like a piece of garbage.”

“Yeah, that’s it! Here. Let me see it.” I reached to take it from his hands.

Ash shook his head. “Look at this thing. It’s crooked, it’s taped together, and it rattles. I dunno …”

He was right. In the bright light of day, it looked even more homemade than it had the night before. He peered over my shoulder as I punched the keys again, still without results. “There’s no zero,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. The old guy was in a really big hurry when he made this thing.” I kept punching keys. Just as before, nothing happened. What was I doing wrong?

Then it hit me. If this were a game or a calculator or just about any other kind of electronic device, it would have an on/off button. Trembling all over, I ran my fingers around the sides, then felt a tiny raised switch on the left. I turned the unner and looked closely. It was a sliding switch—very small, shiny black, and unlabeled. I took a deep breath and slid the switch upward.

The little machine began to hum. I couldn’t hear it, exactly, but I felt it in the palm of my hand, like the beating of a dragonfly’s wings. The display screen glowed dimly in the shade of the trees. Three zeroes appeared on it. And each of the colored buttons in the center lit up, then went dark again, in turn. I jumped as the unner made a brief sound like a miniature silver bell, then returned to humming quietly, as if waiting for instructions.

“Whoa!” said Ash.

A wave of excitement rippled up my spine. It was hard to think straight. Ash whipped his baseball cap off and jammed it into the back pocket of his jeans, which is what he always does when he wants to concentrate. He huddled closer to me so he could see the screen and the control buttons.

“O.K., let’s stay calm,” he said, his voice shaky. I think he was saying it as much for himself as for me. “We have to do this scientifically.”

This seemed reasonable enough. “O.K., but … what’s our hypothesis?”

“Hypothesis?” Ash stared blankly at the controls. “I don’t know.”

I stared for a while, too, trying to slow my mind down enough so I could catch some sensible thought before it slipped away. It was an uphill battle. “I wonder what these crazy words mean,” I said after a few seconds. “HMODE, MMODE, and SMODE.” I looked some more and again noticed the three bold letters beside the screen, one under the other:
H, M
, and
S
. “H MODE, M MODE, S MODE?” I punched the small, round, yellow button that said HMODE. It lit up.

“What are you doing?” cried Ash. He sounded horrified.

But I was too engrossed to pay much attention. “I’ll bet it’s in H mode now, whatever that means.” Ash gave me a rabbit punch in the arm. “Ow!” I said. “What’d you do that for?”

“Listen to me! Don’t touch anything else yet. For all you know, you could undo your whole life.”

I licked my lips. He had a point. On the other hand, I was pretty sure nothing major would happen until I punched the
ORDER
button, which I didn’t intend to do. Not yet, anyway. “I think it’s O.K.,” I said.

Ash leaped to his feet. He’s careful with his language. When he says a rude word, you know he’s really upset. He said one now and followed it with, “Don’t be a moron, Gib! This is way too dangerous.”